Is it time?

Back in the late 90's early 2000's I remember getting a new Intel Pentium II computer. I then formatted the disk and reinstalled Windows 98 and Office 97 on my previous Intel Pentium PC and donated to a neighbour that couldn't afford buying her own. Along with an old 33K dial up modem was all she needed to play with and do some work. Until a few years later she could finally buy her own. Why throw away a perfectly working computer, just because it is old? Some churches also have free computer lessons for children or seniors. We can donate our old computers there and avoid throwing them away.

I remember my first Windows PC. I had used my employer's Win 95 and Win 98 but never owned my own Windows PC until around the turn of the millennium. It was a Sony VAIO with a Pentium II chip. State of the art with Windows Mistake Edition. Before that I used a Tandy. I'm thinking it was probably about the worst time to buy a brand new PC. Windows XP revolutionized everything and SATA made life so much easier. Here are some ideas on what one can do with some of those "older" PCs today.

You can put large disks on them and configure them as media server, you can download stuff there so you don't risk infection on your main PC, you can connect them to TV with appropriate adapters and watch videos or Netflix. The best of all, you can install emulators and use it for retro gaming.

I found an old 500gb ssd and now I want to use that for my c:\ w11 op sys drive. It's an old Crucial MX500. I don't remember now if that was the good one or the bad one. I hope it was the good one. And when I say old, it's probably a couple of years old. Good plan?

I have a 2tb ssd there now. My new plan is to remove all the drives from my pc, install only the 500gb ssd and install w11 from my Rufus usb drive. Then after windows is all done installing and updating, then format and install the 2tb ssd and then install the rest of the drives.

Will that work? Can I use my Rufus w11 usb drive to install w11 to a freshly formatted ssd? I like doing it this way because if something bad happens during the install I can swap back in the 2tb ssd and not lose anything.

And I have another question too: I realize that I am installing Windows bypassing the requirements. My mb has a 20 pin TPM header. If I buy and install a TPM module will I see any benefit from that? Will any programs or something be looking for that? I'm not itching to spend money or anything, I'm just curious if that will help with anything behind the scenes... Just looking for ways to be more efficient.

And yeah don't worry guys, I know how to cannibalize pc's lol. My dad was a pack rat and guess what - that trickles down. OMG I had to get rid of so much stuff when we moved. And the stuff I kept, well now I can't find anything lol. But it's all good. 6 months in now. I'm getting there.

TIA again. I really appreciate having somewhere I can go to ask questions.

sdtag said:

And yeah don't worry guys, I know how to cannibalize pc's lol. My dad was a pack rat and guess what - that trickles down. OMG I had to get rid of so much stuff when we moved.

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Trust me. I can relate.

Yes, your Crucial MX500 should work just fine. Make sure you TRIM it first, before you install your OS. Also, I would advise disconnecting the 2TB drive before you install your OS. That way nothing will be compromised in the event the install fails. You can reconnect it after. You will not be able to run both Operating Systems at the same time on your PC if they are identical.

Adding a TPM2 module may or may not give your PC Windows 11 compliance. Compliance is largely determined by the CPU you're using. For example, even though I have a TPM2 chip on my header in my X99 build Windows does not consider my PC to be Windows 11 ready because of my CPU. I would suggest that on older PCs it really isn't worth the effort. One would be better off just going with Rufus. That's my opinion. Have fun cannibalizing!

I installed Windows 11 on an old HP-ENVY with a 2014 BIOS date, no TPM2, and an unsupported processor using Rufus. It's running 26H2 just fine.

I bought a Beelink mini PC back in 2021 mostly to play and experiment with Windows 11 when it was new. It had the required 8th gen Intel CPU (core i5, 8279u), it had 16GB of RAM, had a 512GB NVMe, windows 10 pro and was $475. Figured I didn't have much to lose. When I got it, i found the device had a single stick of 16GB of RAM, so I bought another 16GB stick to get it to dual channel. Want to say it was about $50 for the RAM, so all in all, had about $525 in the little device. I already had a spare 500GB Sata 3 SSD lying around which i tossed into the box to expand my storage.

That little device has been outstanding. I use it every day as my daily use Windows pc. I still have my full desktop gaming rig, but I really only use that for gaming, rest of the time it's asleep. The Beelink mini pc does everything I need it to and takes a fraction of the power of my desktop. I have it setup for a dual boot with Windows 11 and Rocky Linux.

My other daily driver is my Mac Mini, which I just upgraded from an M1 to an M6. I use that for some audio stuff, video stuff and running some LLM stuff. Thing is crazy powerful for a 5x5 box.

The i5, 8279u is barely faster than the ancient i7, 3770 that was in my 10+ year old HP-ENVY, one of the major reasons I retired that one was the processor speed and the graphics performance.

I do have a little mini-PC, but I use it for a print server and a video slide show controller, it handles those just fine. My little mini-PC just has the N150 processor, but it does have 16GB and a 1TB SSD. It also only cost me $145 last year.

gunrunnerjohn said:

The i5, 8279u is barely faster than the ancient i7, 3770 that was in my 10+ year old HP-ENVY, one of the major reasons I retired that one was the processor speed and the graphics performance.

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Well, this is a 5 year old mini-PC and it was never meant to offer blistering performance and cutting edge technology. It's a 28w TDP CPU. I don't use this particular PC for heaving lifting tasks. That's what my Ryzen 9 5900x system was/is for.

My Mini PC let's me see what's new in Windows 11, lets me read my email, reddit, this forum and watch YoutubeTV. It's also my main guitar tab machine for playing along and learning new music. For all of that tasks, it's been a great little box. no complaints from me on performance. And it's about the same size as 1 of my 140mm fans inside of my fractal meshify s2 case. I did the math once and I could run 80 of my Beelink mini pc's in the same footprint that my gaming PC case takes.

I know this should be at the bottom of my priority list but my old tower just looks so much cooler than a mini.
No offense all you mini guys. Well I like it anyway. Especially with the lights off in the office.
I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder lol.
Pardon my dustiness.

You guys blow away my initiation to the PC. I jumped into it with good ol' PACKARD BELL Multimedia E140, bought Fall of 1996
150 MHz Intel Pentium processor; 1.6 GB HDD; 16 MB RAM (upgradable to 128 MB); 1 MB video memory (upgradable to 2 MB).

It didn't take long before I opened up the case and added motherboard ram and graphics ram to upgrade it. Little did I know, as we usually don't, the rabbit hole to which that would lead. What fun!!!

sdtag said:

I know this should be at the bottom of my priority list but my old tower just looks so much cooler than a mini.
No offense all you mini guys. Well I like it anyway. Especially with the lights off in the office.
I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder lol.
Pardon my dustiness.

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No offense taken. I still have a full size desktop machine that I use for gaming. I don't really care for all the RGB stuff, so my RGB stuff on my build is minimal. My Rog Strix mobo has a bit and my EVGA 3080 FTW3 has a bit, but other than that, I don't have RGB fans, or coolers or the like.
But I like a little tiny box like this that just sits tucked away consuming about 15w of power.

Mini PCs are ideal for office or a cashier because they are powerful enough and take very little space on desk. Old Intel Mac Minis could also dual boot with Windows and used instead. However I don't like that you can't add a discrete graphics card or other expansion cards. Back when DVD drives were still usable you couldn't add one, it had to be sn external which was more expensive. So it is not intended for gaming or other demanding work, but for everything else is perfect.

spapakons said:

So it is not intended for gaming or other demanding work, but for everything else is perfect.

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Yeah, not gaming focused that's for sure. As far as demanding work goes, it all depends upon what's in that mini PC. My newest Mac Mini can crank out some pretty reasonable performance for some pretty demanding tasks.

starchase said:

You guys blow away my initiation to the PC. I jumped into it with good ol' PACKARD BELL Multimedia E140, bought Fall of 1996
150 MHz Intel Pentium processor; 1.6 GB HDD; 16 MB RAM (upgradable to 128 MB); 1 MB video memory (upgradable to 2 MB).

It didn't take long before I opened up the case and added motherboard ram and graphics ram to upgrade it. Little did I know, as we usually don't, the rabbit hole to which that would lead. What fun!!!
View attachment 185742View attachment 185743

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My first PC was state of the art gaming PC at the time, a Hyundai Super 16V model with Intel 8088 4.77MHz or 10MHz at turbo speed, 640KB RAM, 5.25" dual density floppy disk drive (360KB), 3.5" dual density floppy disk drive (720KB), Seagate 40MB hard disk on a controller card (no controller on the motherboard), VGA 256KB graphics card, no sound only the internal beeper and a game controller card. It was running MS-DOS 3.3 later upgraded to 5.0 and could play almost all PC games of the time. Pity it was obsolete after a few years. My second PC was a custom-built Intel Pentium 150MHz with 256MB RAM, 5.25" high density floppy disk drive (1.2MB), 3.5" high density floppy disk drive (1.44MB), 2GB hard disk, Matrox Mystique 2MB graphics card and Creative SoundBlaster AWE 32 sound card. It was running Windows 95, later upgraded to Windows 98 and eventually to Windows XP. Not the fastest possible for the time, but it was perfect for most MS-DOS and Windows games. Pre-built OEM computers were usually more expensive and used mostly from businesses and organisations. Home users preferred to custom-build their computer so they would choose exactly the components they wanted and pay for them only, not for the brand name. We could go to the shop, choose the components and let them build it for us. Later I added the Matrox Rainbow Runner daughterboard on the Matrox Mystique graphics card so I had video inputs/outputs and I could capture analog video! I remember my first capture, I wanted to get the maximum quality, so I set the maximum resolution at 704x576 and 25fps (PAL). I also chose the Matrox MJPEG compression and the higher bitrate. The little video I captured was perfect by then standards, with a little detail... The file size was 700MB which almost filled my hard disk! Of course I immediately deleted it and used more realistic capture settings to get a smaller file.

First computer that I had was a hand me down from my dad, and was a Leading Edge D86 if I remember correctly.


The first PC that I ever bought with my own money, I got when I was in college. It was a packard bell 486sx-25. Had 4MB of memory, which I ultimately upgraded to 20MB, and it was a 170MB IDE hard drive. I later replaced that hard drive with a 730MB Western Digital that I thought that I would never be able to fill. Had an FC20 parallel port accelerator card and a Colorado Jumbo 250 Tape drive. At some point, I upgraded the CPU to the Intel Pentium Overdrive 63 CPU.

starchase said:

You guys blow away my initiation to the PC. I jumped into it with good ol' PACKARD BELL Multimedia E140, bought Fall of 1996
150 MHz Intel Pentium processor; 1.6 GB HDD; 16 MB RAM (upgradable to 128 MB); 1 MB video memory (upgradable to 2 MB).

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My initiation to computers was going to work for IBM in the 1960's. I built my first home computer with wire-wrap boards using the 8080 processor, then upgraded to the Z80 a couple years later. My first "PC" was the IBM-PC I bought in 1982, it ran PC-DOS and had the 8088 processor. There was a steady procession of faster computers about every year after that for a long time. I've slowed down a lot, I used to replace my computer at every two years at a maximum, sometimes even quicker. However, my last computer I had for almost ten years, I guess old age has slowed me down!

pparks1 said:

First computer that I had was a hand me down from my dad, and was a Leading Edge D86 if I remember correctly.
View attachment 185758

The first PC that I ever bought with my own money, I got when I was in college. It was a packard bell 486sx-25. Had 4MB of memory, which I ultimately upgraded to 20MB, and it was a 170MB IDE hard drive. I later replaced that hard drive with a 730MB Western Digital that I thought that I would never be able to fill. Had an FC20 parallel port accelerator card and a Colorado Jumbo 250 Tape drive. At some point, I upgraded the CPU to the Intel Pentium Overdrive 63 CPU.

View attachment 185759

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I was thinking the same about my "huge" 40MB hard disk. How am I going to fill that? But no matter how large disk we have, we eventually fill it and complain it is small! I even managed to fill my 6TB video disk. I frequently copy videos to another disk and delete them trying to keep the free space over 800GB. Not enough by today's standards. I think I might upgrade it in Christmas to at least 10TB, assuming the disk prices fall by then.

gunrunnerjohn said:

My initiation to computers was going to work for IBM in the 1960's. I built my first home computer with wire-wrap boards using the 8080 processor, then upgraded to the Z80 a couple years later. My first "PC" was the IBM-PC I bought in 1982, it ran PC-DOS and had the 8088 processor. There was a steady procession of faster computers about every year after that for a long time. I've slowed down a lot, I used to replace my computer at every two years at a maximum, sometimes even quicker. However, my last computer I had for almost ten years, I guess old age has slowed me down!

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I have my current PC (2nd system specs) over 12 years. I gradually upgraded the CPU, maximized the RAM. upgraded the mechanical hard disk to SSD, replaced the graphics card... I have made it as fast as it gets. I don't like that Microsoft is trying to tell us computers like that are "obsolete". As far as I know "obsolete" means something no longer useful that is replaced by something newer. I would not say my computer is not useful, on the contrary. It can even play some games with the graphics set to medium-high. Some even with graphics set to high-ultra. As long as I can upgrade it to the next Windows version, I will keep it. If I can no longer upgrade it, I will still keep it until it doesn't meet my needs. I decide when it is "obsolete", nobody else.

gunrunnerjohn said:

However, my last computer I had for almost ten years, I guess old age has slowed me down!

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Yeah, I think that although the rate of improvements continues on computers, it's just not as substantial as it once was. I'm in the same boat, I keep computers a lot longer now than I used to. And I think age has an impact too, I find when I have free time I like to sit around by a fire, drink a beer and relax with friends. I work in IT, so I'm on the computer, all day every day. I don't like to come home and sit on the computer all night at this point.