With prices and ensh!tification of everything, how many of you are buying old hardware?

RD Mercer · Wednesday at 8:33 PM

Heck, I’m just a web surfer, my ASRock Z97 Extreme4 board with the 4790k with 32 gig of ddr3 with a Samsung 500 gig M.2 mounted on a PCIE board and the one gigahertz Internet speed, this thing smokes all across the www.

I actually have 3 identical systems just like this one.

Scannerman · Wednesday at 9:37 PM

hsehestedt said:
I find systems running DDR4 and Gen 4 SSDs (even gen 3) to still be great machines.

Most of the systems here on the home front are running DDR3. They seem to be the most trouble free units of all despite being non-compliant with Win11, but now my girls are spoiled by very efficient lap tops so they rarely ever use their desktop PCs anymore. I'm baiting my Blondie with the new AMD build, hoping 64GB of DDR5 system RAM will be enough so I can keep the other 64 (it came with 128) for a better build using that NVMe I mentioned earlier.

Scannerman · Wednesday at 9:42 PM

RD Mercer said:
Heck, I’m just a web surfer, my ASRock Z97 Extreme4 board with the 4790k with 32 gig of ddr3 with a Samsung 500 gig M.2 mounted on a PCIE board and the one gigahertz Internet speed, this thing smokes all across the www. I actually have 3 identical systems just like this one.

Ha! I think I know what system you're talking about! I nearly bought that platform back in the day, but I settled on an ASUS Z87 Sabertooth because it was a good price. The missus uses it now and she's very possessive of it. Noooo touchy! I don't know if I'm ever going to convince her to give it up.

Very stable system. Very low latency.

hsehestedt · 2026-10-29T03:22:23-0400

Ironically, I just received a new Mini PC today that I won as a prize. Ancient machine, J3455 Celeron CPU, 4GB RAM, 4GB eMMC storage but it can also accommodate an M.2 drive and a 2.5" drive. The M.2 might be SATA only although I don't know the specs yet.

As slow as this thing is I'm sure that I will find something to task it with.

EDIT: I was wrong about the M.2 slot. Research says that is an mSATA port. Yikes! Have never even had an mSATA SSD.

cheaterslick · 2026-10-29T04:19:44-0400

hsehestedt said:
Yikes! Have never even had an mSATA SSD

Oh yes, they were once a popular form factor.

Even I, had one.

Bree · 2026-10-29T08:05:34-0400

hsehestedt said:
Ironically, I just received a new Mini PC today that I won as a prize. Ancient machine, J3455 Celeron CPU, 4GB RAM, 4GB eMMC storage but it can also accommodate an M.2 drive and a 2.5" drive. The M.2 might be SATA only although I don't know the specs yet.

As slow as this thing is I'm sure that I will find something to task it with.

The J3455 is an unsupported device, of course. But it does have SSE4.2 so (with a workaround) it will run the latest versions of W11.

Intel Celeron J3455 @ 2195.58 MHz - CPU-Z VALIDATOR

No slouch too, it actually out-performs the 1st gen i5 in my System Two (and I have that multi-booting 26H2 and the latest Insider Experimental builds).

Intel Celeron J3455 vs i5-520M [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

hsehestedt · 2026-10-29T08:19:08-0400

Bree said:
The J3455 is an unsupported device, of course.

Yeah, I already did a clean install on it. After booting it for the first time with its original factory configuration that had Windows 11 24H2 on it I made a backup of all the drivers and then immediately did a clean install. I only perform unattended installations of Windows and my default unattended install answer file already bypasses compatibility checks so that's never an issue for me. But you are right that it runs Windows 11 reasonably well although I would definitely consider it too slow for typical use. For exceptionally light work may be but even just going through the settings menus on that machine is slow. I need to verify this but I think that the 4 gigabyte is nonexpandable which is a shame because that would be one way to get a little bit better performance out of it. But what I may try to do is pick up a cheap small mSATA drive for it because I'm pretty sure that'll be faster than that stupid emmc storage built onto the motherboard.

gunrunnerjohn · 2026-10-29T10:17:05-0400

hsehestedt said:
I have some really old machines, definitely not technically supported by Windows 11, but they all run Windows 11 flawlessly. I've come to the conclusion that for a lot of basic tasks, old machines are just fine. But I do like to always have one fairly current system (made within the last 5 years) for tasks that require more compute power.

I find systems running DDR4 and Gen 4 SSDs (even gen 3) to still be great machines.

I have an old 2014 dated machine that I installed Win11 on, primarily to see if I could. It's been continually updated to the latest version with no issues at all. I recently ran the TPM.msc checker on it ant is doesn't seem to mind there is no TPM. I believe this machine actually has TPM 1.2, but I installed with Rufus bypassing the TPM requirement.

Bree · 2026-10-29T10:24:03-0400

gunrunnerjohn said:
....doesn't seem to mind there is no TPM. I believe this machine actually has TPM 1.2, but I installed with Rufus bypassing the TPM requirement.

Windows 11 is hard-coded to only use TPM 2.0. It does not see and won't use TPM 1.2 when present.

gunrunnerjohn · 2026-10-29T10:49:09-0400

Bree said:
Windows 11 is hard-coded to only use TPM 2.0. It does not see and won't use TPM 1.2 when present.

I know that's what Microsoft says, but it's interesting to note that TPM.MSC specifically asked to check and see if you had TPM 1.2 or later!

glasskuter · 2026-10-29T13:16:29-0400

hsehestedt said:
Have never even had an mSATA SSD

Me either but a friend gave me an older defunct Lenovo Yoga. I took its 512gb msata drive out, put it into an enclosure,and used it for a while as a backup drive for my husband's PC. Several months ago my own external 256 gb m.2 nvme was running out of storage so I swapped it with the external msata. Since my files are mostly small text and rarely used saved installation files, I honestly can't tell the difference day to day. When/If ensh!tification ever ends I'll buy another nvme and turn the msata back into a backup drive. HDSentinel still rates its health as excellent.

Buddywh · 2026-10-29T18:59:10-0400

Bree said:
Windows 11 is hard-coded to only use TPM 2.0. It does not see and won't use TPM 1.2 when present.

That's not exactly true since it depends on how it's being used.

I have an old AM3+ system with an early UEFI BIOS on Win11 and it has only a D-TPM1.2 device. Windows 11 is using the device to seal the Bitlocker VMK, and the TPM is used to validate stored PCR measurements after a secure boot before unsealing it to unlock the Bitlocker encrypted system volume.

So Win11 IS using it and it works very well. It has never failed to unlock the OSV as it should and forces me into key recovery when something changes to cause a mismatch, such as disabling secure boot (CMOS reset).

And the system is on Win 11 Pro, 26300.9711 right now, installed on the system as an upgrade from win10 by changing the registry keys to make the installer not run compatibility checks. So it is a current and updated Windows 11 build.

And lastly: I can't say how it might or might not be useful for Hello for Business, or Credential Guard, or Virtualization-Based Security, or device health attestation, or any of several other possible uses. That might be where it matters for some, but I don't have need of it for my home system and the point is: Windows DOES use it for Bitlocker VMK security so it can't really be 'hard-coded' to use only a TPM2.0 device in all use cases.

With prices and ensh!tification of everything, how many of you are buying old hardware?

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