One year after ditching Windows 10 I have bitten the bullet and put together a new system to run it. It becomes more difficult as time goes on, for various reasons, to buck the shift to Win10, but having had to take this challenging step, it still won't be the main computer that I do most of my work on everyday. And having made that decision to have it as the operating system for the token Windows computer in the household, the question has then naturally been whether to keep running it on a crippled low-spec system or to find something better.
That something better is a new Gigabyte GA-H110-S2H Skylake motherboard with the low-end Intel H110 chipset, a low-end Pentium G 4400 dual core CPU, and 8 GB of DDR-4 RAM. I have put into it one of the existing NVidia NV210SL low cost dual head graphics cards that I had for my computers; and although it uses a low spec chipset it is still capable of having 32 GB of RAM installed. So having mentioned previously that there was this problem with a computer called a DG41RQ that I built about five years ago, I obviously wanted to be sure this computer wasn't going to have the same limitations as that lemon. The pair of GA-E350s that I bought have been limited as well, but I had more of an appreciation of their restrictions at the time when I purchased them. They have achieved a lot considering they were just put together to give me a basic system I could use as a remote access client and some other low demand stuff at work. Unfortunately it has turned out that they don't support virtualisation properly and that has always been an important issue. There is no way in the last 10 years I would have bought a system that didn't support virtualisation because these days most hypervisors of any sort (including software based systems like VirtualBox and VMWare, as well as baremetal hypervisors like Hyper-V) require it installed especially for 64 bit clients. There is also the issue that AMD has dropped support for the video chipset in the E350s - having phased the chipset out of production they stopped making new drivers as quickly as they could.
So with this new system I expect it will be good for 10 years because I don't like forking out for new hardware when there are plenty of better things to spend money on and having three computers on my desk, when they all have relatively high specs, is hard enough to justify. Because the Intel H110 chipset and the Pentium G CPUs may be considered somewhat low spec (and certainly low in cost) but in actuality have heaps of performance, especially with 8 GB or more of RAM installed. It's running Windows 10, which is more efficient with hardware resources than some of its predecessors. And it won't be running a lot of intensive demanding software because those kinds of tasks happen on my main PC with its 24 GB of RAM. The choice of the H110 chipset and Pentium G are based on my contention that the pricing for a lot of computer hardware such as Core i3, i5 or i7 CPUs is outrageously high for the extra performance they supposedly bring, and lots of people are conned into paying for these models of CPU that they will never use the extra power of.
The Win10 edition is Pro, and that is what I will use for the long term. Installation was quite pain free, and it is the latest release version, so it hasn't had to put in many updates so far. It will take me a few days to set everything up on it and transfer the data from the old Win8.1 installation. But it looks good already.
