It never ends.

Today, at a liquidation store in Langford, I bought these :

I thought the garage was a little empty.

They are Dell Optiplex SFF (Small Form Factor) 7040 machines, no hard drives of course, but two have a sixth generation i5-6500 cpu and the other two have very capable i7-6700 processors. Three of them had 16GB of DDR4 and one had none, each has a DVD rewriter and the motherboards are modern enough to have an m.2 slot. After a  little attention, all four of them work and I have no idea what to do with them yet. It is a sign of the times that these four potentially useful computers cost me a paltry $45 for them all, and I will do my best to save them, and others like them, from the landfill.

The scope of waste in the electronics industry is unprecedented, the store that I bought these at had probably fifty other desktops a little bit older than the ones I bought, the four I bought have sixth generation "Skylake" Intel processors and the remaining units at the store have the fourth generation "Haswell" processors from 2014 which are considered obsolete by the industry and the brainwashed buying public. If I could buy them all I would and make them into useful "office" machines, however, I realise that behaviour like that will maybe make me change the blog name from TOTG to TOCTG with the added letter indicating I have gone crazy, which I probably already have.

Anyone want to buy a camel?

Love them, new machines, even when they're not new.

For an old bloke like me, today was an exciting day, because during the week I discovered that the Victoria "Asset Investment Recovery Branch" was again open, Fridays from 9.00am through to 4.00pm, and the cash and carry was once again available to walk in plebs like myself. I did not have this blog way back in time, before covid, when this place was open, but back in the day, I bought stuff on a regular basis, mostly Lenovo branded stuff, released from the bonds of government servitude, monster machines for bread and butter money. Then of course, covid came along and spoiled all of our fun, all of it, almost every little bit of it, except for alcohol of course, covid basically just enhanced alcohol usage and streaming Netflix while it was cheap.

There is, online, lots of hate directed at Microsoft, and perhaps Intel as well, for coming up with all the machines that are considered obsolete when it comes to the massively mediocre Windows 11 operating system, because of TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot and Master Boot Records and well, the new way of doing that particular thing called GPT for newer machines, because we all need bigger storage, because, well, we do and to push back from that is silly, is it not?

This is one of those machines, in fact the last generation of the machines that are not compatible with what Microsoft deems acceptable, shame on them, all of those people, for they know not what they do.

Ok, back to me and the Asset Investment wotsit, we went there today, after having our tires rotated for the fifth time at Westshore Tires, never understood tire rotation, I am sure every time I drive that car the tires are rotated. Anyhoo, after all that bullshit we went to the Government recovery branch star chamber and bought this baby :  

This is my kind of purchase, a poor little laptop that nobody wants, the Asset Recovery people are making sure that they are recovering tax payers dollars from all the kit that has been used a bit by government employess, their technicians pull the solid state hard drive out of them for security purposes (yeah, right) and then they sell the laptops without a boot drive, but that can be bought for a few bucks and Windows 10, which is good for at least a year nowadays, can be installed and validated free, because it is baked into the UEFI of the individual machine and is quite legal.

Nuts and bolts ; this T-470s laptop, in like new condition, has 8GB of DDR4 ram and an i5-7300u CPU, has a backlit keyboard (essential for Mr. Magoo characters like myself) and a great screen, plus adapter and all that, so all I need to do is install an M.2 solid state hard drive and install an operating system, which of course will NOT be Windows 10 or 11, but will be a LInux based distro.

The laptop was $75 plus tax. I have bought a 500GB M.2 SSD for $40 and am now waiting for the nice Amazon truck person to deliver it and when it arrives I will go through the installation of the M.2 drive and then, probably perhaps, the installation of an operating system on the new (to me) baby and wonder what the hell I am going to do with it.

Putting it all together.

Out with the old and in with the new is not quite the right thing to say as it should be "out with the old and in with the not so old", basically my lifelong habit of recycling everything from a previous computer and creating a machine with more capability, plus the support of the latest variant of a familiar operating system.

I wrote this to my buddy this morning :

"It is definitely a security and performance improvement to switch from our current (not supported) motherboards and CPUs to the quite vast array of supported units, changing the ancient master boot record (MBR) to the expanded GUID Partition table (GPT) is required, but relatively straightforward and allows for bigger storage space. The trusted platform module (TPM) built into the supported CPUs and configured with the BIOS of supported motherboards, enhances security, along with a thing they call Secure Boot which again creates a sort of fortress against malware and unsecure programs at the boot stage. All of this is an improvement, in addition to the general hardware improvements the public can enjoy from the new generations of motherboards and processors, USB-C connectivity and the faster USB4 transfer rates, multiple NVME drive support and perhaps even WiFi 7 on the motherboard"

The new motherboard has USB-C and USB 3.2 and supports two NVME drives, but I'm only using one and it also has an M.2 slot for WiFi but I'm using the previous PCIe WiFi card, which coincidently, uses the same type of slot and WiFi card, I like the integrated aspect of the antenna on the old kit and would have to run antenna wires across my motherboard if I used the integrated slot. 

So there we are, the younger motherboard is introduced to all the older bits, and it is time for the post mortem of how much this upgrade cost, which will be shocking. Motherboard was $100 from marketplace, the I/O Shield was $15.40 from eBay and came from the Netherlands (but China actually) and I bought two more 4GB sticks of DDR4 which was another $10 on marketplace. A total of $125.40 for the "new" bits and all the previous kit was reused. Windows 11 Home was installed free with a digital license linked to my Microsoft account, GPT, TPM and Secure boot will keep me safe at night while this backup machine sits in the garage waiting for something to break on my gaming machine.

This upgrade cost is not quite true as it will be offset by selling the replaced motherboard on marketplace, which I estimate will bring in about $50 or thereabouts, although I am optimistic and am swinging for the stars with my initial pricing, we will see I suppose, perhaps the market for sixth and seventh generation kit is over and I will reuse that one and experiment with a gaming machine variant of Linux in the near future. That will be interesting for sure, however, selling the old kit, while I can, is the way forward.

All done! - What's next?

And suddenly, the lid fell off...

 The waiting is over and the end result is, of course, uninspiring.

The new motherboard has been accepted into the microsoft family, the digital license that was on the previous, so called obsolete, motherboard has been transferred on my account and after setting up TPM and secure boot in the BIOS, and a few days wait, the system cache on their end updated and they allowed me to download the new version.

There will be more waiting however, I had to order an i/o shield and I won't be able to install this motherboard into my old backup case until it arrives, but it will arrive and I will update the blog with the installation and completion of this particular project.

Preparing for October

The countdown to the end of support for Windows 10 continues (although as expected it has been extended to 2026) and although I have converted three of our daily machines (my laptop and two streaming boxes) to Linux mint we are retaining two gaming machines (and their respective backup machines) and converting all four to run a legal, supported, Windows 11. 

The CPU and motherboard on the converted machines have to be supported, so anything not on the Microsoft list can only run an unsupported (rufus) type win11 installation or an alternative OS such as Linux. There are complexities involved in both directions, linux in particular if you have had a lifetime running Microsoft, but I should add, there are certain irritants with the "new and improved" version of windows, the main one being we were very happy ticking along using the almost obsolete version. 

This is an Asus Prime H470-Plus with an Intel i3-10100 CPU which used, cost me $100 on marketplace. It replaces the previous Asus Z170-Pro with Intel i5-6600K in the backup machine. Online the "obsolete" i5-6600k scores Multithread 6307 with single thread 2316 and the i3-10100 Multithread 8551 and single thread 2596 which are just numbers that indicate that the old one is capable of running my game and the replacement will also be fine. The only critical difference is that the old one is not supported.

In the last five years, since Windows 7 (a perfectly fine operating system) was switched for 8.0 and 8.1 and then 10, my life has been a constant game of musical chairs and at times, even though I owned licenses, I had to buy keys to purchase new versions, that is the way the industry wants to do it, sell the same thing to the consumer, over and over.

This is number four and I admit, having been "in the business" now for over thirty years, the hurdles required to transfer license ownership have become taller and frustrating, and of course, the technical hurdles have also increased in size since both Intel and Microsoft decided that they would phase out old hardware if you wanted to use the latest and greatest version of the OS. That is the aspect of all of this that annoys me most, mainly as the phased out hardware is extremely capable of performing the mundane tasks of a daily driver and the business want to send good electronics to the landfill.

Out with the old, in with the new.

No more MBR, in with GPT, now TPM 2.0 and embedded, now secure boot and "keys" that will somehow keep us all safe (which they will not) and then of course, two more final hurdles involving convincing your Microsoft account that you deserve the so called "upgrade" and then of course, waiting for your system to take it's sweet time to give you the Windows 11 update.

That's where I am today. 

Waiting.

Refreshing old Skills

One of the current things in the life of the OTG is refreshing the brain matter, I am writing another book and the process of transcribing and adapting old diary entries into some sort of readable, enjoyable form is triggering many memories of old tech, and in turn, having excess money floating around I am enjoying buying some old and familiar items like calculators and more recently, pocket computers.

This is a pocket computer I have never had, but now I do. One reason why I could never have it is that it was only released in Japan, but operates in English. The PC-G801 is quite popular on eBay and sells for less that would be expected, I suspect the main reason for that is there appears to be no English language manual available, I have searched, and will continue to search, but up to now, nothing.

They called this a pocket computer and it must have fit in pockets back then, they would have been quite large pockets back in the day.

Online, there is a Japanese manual and in addition, a translated PC-G850V manual available, and the operation of that other model is quite similar, so I have been able to program some silly stuff on the PC-G801 and since obtaining this item I have had quite a few hours down memory lane, playing with BASIC programming, a way of justifying the purchase, keeping my mind active.

The programming part of my brain has been neglected now for most of the time I have been retired, so seventeen years, but like riding a bike, it is easy to get back into the saddle so to speak. The little program I wrote here examines the character set and prints it out on the screen based on input limits, I will enter it here for future reference as I intend to write an English manual for the little computer:

10:INPUT "START =";B,"FINISH =";C

15:FOR A=B TO C

20:PRINT CHR$(A);

30:WAIT 10

35:NEXT A

40:END

I have also bought myself a Casio PB-700 which is a "pocket computer" that I did own back in the 1980's so I will report on that one when it arrives, I know there is an English manual for that one.

Prepping for the Zombie Apocalypse

On the subject of hammers, it is always wise to keep your growing collection in good shape for the inevitable zombie apocalypse.  It is a continuing debate if that is actually going to happen, however, better to be safe than sorry as they say.

In addition, I consider that this sort of activity helps to maintain a healthy marriage, with the good lady feeling safe and secure knowing that her good man is in his happy place, dutifully polishing his hammer.