My old desktop had quirks. It was a Win7 Pro box I upgraded to Win10 using Microsoft's free upgrade offer. I had already upgraded a friend's Win8.1 laptop and a Win7 travel laptop, and my SO upgraded her Win7 Home laptop. All went swimmingly, and have been mostly trouble free.
My desktop was odd man out. It was "New and different Win10 Blue Screens of Death - collect the whole set!", and I had been.
The box was a refurb Dell Optiplex Small Form Factor machine, which came with 4GB RAM, a 2.4 ghz quad core Xeon processor, a 240GB SATA HD, and Win7 Pro. I added RAM to bring it to the 8GB max the machine would take, a 240GB SSD, and a low profile ATI graphics card with a GB of video RAM to replace the on-board Intel graphics. There were some speed bumps in getting it where I wanted, but the end result was a machine dual booting Win7 Pro and Ubuntu Linux from SSD, with data on the HD.
It worked well on Win7 but had issues with Win10, even though the upgrade went with no obvious problems. One annoyance was that while the Xeon is a quad core CPU, Win10 only saw two of them. There's a list on Intel's website of what processor models are supported by Win10, and the Xeon wasn't on it.
And BSODs were increasingly problematic. BAD_POOL_HEADER, DCP_PROTECTION_ERROR, and KERNEL_SECURITY_EXCEPTION were too frequent visitors. The last straw was a rear fan failure. The fan is integral to the power supply, and finding a replacement for a no longer made machine would be fun. The simple solution was a new machine.
Off to poke around on Micro Center. The Cleveland based retailer has been expanding, and there's a store in Brooklyn convenient to me. Their website offered a deal on a refurb off-lease corporate machine. HP Elite 8200 Small form factor, with quad-core i5-2400 CPU (on the supported list) at 3.1ghz with a 3.4ghz Turbo mode, 8GB RAM, Intel HD 2000 graphics, a 500GB SATA HD, and Win7 Pro installed, for $249. Sold!
The machine has headroom for expansion. There are four RAM slots, each with a 2GB stick installed, but can be taken to 32GB by swapping in higher capacity RAM. There are four SATA connectors on the motherboard, a PCI-slot, two PCI-e slots, and a mini PCI-e slot. It's USB2, but there's a four port USB3 card that can plug in to the mini-PCIe slot as a future upgrade. I was able to swap in the Crucial MX-100 SSD from the Dell box, and the ATI card.
Getting it up and running under Win7 was painless. It saw the SSD, and the ATI card. And because it was a refurb off-lease corporate box, it wasn't laden with trailware to remove. It had Win7 Pro, Google Chrome, Adobe Reader, and a current Java runtime. Those were all things I'd install anyway.
Next step was a Win10 upgrade. Microsoft's free upgrade offer has long since ended, and you can't download the upgrade media. But I
had the Win10 Pro media on a thumb drive from when the offer was in effect. I was betting it would still work.
And it did, with a quirk. When I inserted the thumb drive and ran setup, it asked if I wanted to check online for updates before proceeding. I said yes, it looked, and told me it didn't see an existing Win10 install and I would need a product key. The Win7 Pro key from the new machine would likely work, but first, I reran setup and said
no to the "Check online for updates?" query.
It matter of factly performed the upgrade from Win7 Pro to Win10 Pro with no prompts for a product key.
(It did check for updates and included them after copying the base upgrade files across for installation. The result, several reboots later, was a validated Win10 Pro installation.
)
Thus far, it's a pleasure to use. The machine is significantly faster than the box it replaces, is rock solid stable, and there have been no traces of BSODs. My impression is that the problem with the Dell box was simply inadequate hardware support. It was a usable platform for Win7, but not up to Win10.
I wound up removing the ATI card, as built-in Intel HD 2000 graphics provided better performance. Intel graphics have historically been fine for 2D graphics but fallen down on 3D, which is why I added the ATI card to the Dell. I'm not a gamer, but did want better 3D available. The Intel graphics in the HP box are improved over what was provided with the Dell.
A plus is the the HP machine is designed for easy service. A side panel comes off by pulling a lever, and there is easy access to all components. I was able to add the 240 GB Seagate Barracuda drive from the Dell as a secondary drive in an unused bay beneath the built-in DVD-ROM, which eased the shuffling I needed to do before migrating to SSD.
And some disk performance tests showed the 500GB Toshiba HD provided with the HP machine is significantly faster than the Barracuda from the Dell, which is another factor in the improved performance I see.
Next step, once booted from SSD, will be repartitioning it from Windows Disk Management, carving out a raw slice, and installing Ubuntu. On the Dell, Ubuntu saw the raw slice, formatted it ext4, and installed to it with no intervention from me to tell it where to install. The result there was a multi-boot setup offering a choice of Ubuntu, Win10 from SSD, or Win7 from HD (since I upgraded the Win7 instance on the SSD.) Since I upgraded to Win10 on the HD, Win7 won't be an option on multi-boot, but I don't care.
Thus far, things have proceeded smoothly. There will still be things to do after boot from SSD is set up, like installing Ubuntu and setting up the rest of my preferred configuration, but that was expected. I foresee the Snoopy Happy Dance in my future.
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Dennis