Re: I need a new/used lab computer
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If you looking for the quickest way to get back running, it's going to be to change the caps in the power supply and motherboard. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours of work to change them with a vacuum solder sucker tool, and a hot air gun. I always pre-heat the area with the hot air, then use the vacuum solder sucker to just give it the final bit of heat to melt the solder and vacuum out the holes.
That's going to be heaps faster than getting a new machine, and re-installing all the software from scratch - especially windows - it takes forever to install and update and remember all the little tweaks you had to make along the way. If it was linux, that'd be a different story - usually installing takes about 5 minutes, updating to the latest packages online another 5 or 10, and you're pretty much ready to go. With windows, it's usually hours and hours, to days, depending on how you do it.
Well, yes, I probably could try to fix the old machine, but the limiting factor is time.? If you're retired, and I'm not, that may make sense.? No rabbit holes here, thank you very much!? And there are of course many that one could jump down in this situation.? I just need something quick and dirty.
Regarding OSs, I'm running Win 10 on this Dell all-in-one I'm writing this on, just got forcibly updated to Win 11 from Win 10 recently on my work laptop computer, and as I said originally, ran Win 7 installed in place of Vista on the now-defunct lab PC.? I've used Linux before, several years ago after a friend warned me about the danger of going online with a non-longer-supported OS like Win7 and turned me on to wubi.exe (dead simple Windows UBuntu Installer) so I was happily using Ubuntu Linux online and dual-booted to Win 7 for everything else, until one day Linux wouldn't boot.? Alas, I was unable to find wubi.exe online, and that was the end of my using Linux.? Someday I'll get back into it.? Yet another rabbit hole...
The quickest, easiest way to get back to a computer hosting the GPIB card and connecting to my cheapo USB microscope and Leo Bodnar GPSDO and to the Internet will win the day.
Thanks, everybody.
Jim
On Friday, March 7, 2025 at 02:25:26 PM CST, Adrian Godwin via <artgodwin= [email protected]> wrote:
I'm not a windows fan, but a while back got a tiny machine with windows 8 on it. It felt like using a phone as a computer. It updated to 10 (painfully, it didn't really have enough free space to do it properly) and is still horrible to use. I do have an alternate boot to win 7 on my linux laptop which I use occasionally for some proprietary config tool etc.?
But recently that was happening too often so I grabbed a cheap pc (second hand NUC 7i7 for ?70 ish) and it came with W11, no option.?
To be honest, I find it more usable than anything since W7. I think they might have walked back some of the worst errors of the last few years. It's still frustrating and naggy compared with debian but it's not quite so horrible.
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Now I might be missing some as-yet unencountered part of the W11 experience which will drive me to distraction, but at this point I'm thinking it's not as bad as painted. Especially compared with 10. Is what does it do badly ? So far I've avoided registering it as I don't see any point but it is slowly putting in uncustomisable and unpleasant behaviour so apparently it's built to annoy. Does the level of intrusive adverts eventually grow to the point where it's unusable ?
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