Once a year in late spring the power plant has an annual maintenance outage. This outage usually requires several 12 hour days in a row, followed by a single day off. The money is great, but free time is quite limited during outage. At my house, the single day off is used for rest, minor chores, and yard maintenance.
Due to outage and some other social events, the new PC sat in a corner gathering dust for a while. Eventually outage ended, which freed up some personal time. I borrowed a spare keyboard from work, along with a mouse, and monitor, so that I could transfer files from the old to the new. I didn't want to have to swap peripherals between machines.
Below, about to begin the process. An Energy Drink (or three) is a must for this process. The left one is the new rig with the borrowed peripherals. It turned out that the borrowed monitor didn't work, so I still ended up swapping the right monitor back and forth.
Hmmmm. Apparently it wants to have an Operating System installed.
I put the Windows 10 disk in the optical drive, and the drive started reading it. Very encouraging!
Then it sat here for the longest time showing no progress... You always wonder if it's going to be OK, which is never a good feeling when you have a lot of time and money invested in the project.
The Windows installer takes care of most of it, with a few minor tweaks afterwards.
The minor tweaks are setting up a Microsoft account and activating Windows, then setting things up to your liking.
Follow the directions. Patience is definitely a virtue during this process.
Whee! Made it to the Windows 10 start screen. It even comes with a pre-installed web browser that is perfect for downloading a good browser. Unfortunately you cannot remove the Edge browser - all you can do is get rid of the icon.
I still had an annoying issue after the installation. It kept giving me a warning message at the bottom right that my version of Windows was not activated, and that I need to purchase an approved copy from the Windows Store. Well this was a brand new unopened Windows 10 CD that I had purchased from Amazon. For whatever reason, the code on the CD case did not activate the Windows O/S. I had to call tech support, and he walked me through an alternate process with a special code. It was an added pain in the ass with a long phone wait that I didn't need.
I fired up the Microsoft Edge browser once, to download a good browser (Firefox). Afterwards I installed the following extensions into the browser. These prevent every webpage you visit from planting cookies on your new machine and placing annoying advertisements in your face. Most browsers support these extensions.
YouTube is almost impossible to enjoy without an ad blocker, so AdBlock Plus is a must. Also I am not a fan of allowing web pages to run scripts on my computer, so I use NoScript. Between the six extensions in the above image, I keep 99% of online bullshit from being displayed on my screen. Then I can read articles without annoying motion off to one side, pop-ups opening up at random, and view videos without watching commercials. Very nice.
A few things to remember when swapping from one PC to another. Obviously, you want to transfer all of your media:
- Video, Images, Music, Documents.
- You should go through your "downloads" folder and see if there are any files you recently placed on your old machine that you have forgotten about. You might want to transfer some of these to your new machine.
- Web Browser bookmarks and passwords
- You should use the file explorer to view every important file folder. Copy anything you might need to a folder on a thumb drive, and transfer that onto the new machine.
- Take a picture of your desktop, so that your important shortcuts can be reproduced on the new machine.
The AMD Radeon video card on the new machine uses a video standard that I've never used before, called DisplayPort. DisplayPort has been around since 2006, but I've only used HDMI and DVI cables. The DisplayPort is backward compatible with HDMI and DVI (with adapters), and is intended to replace VGA altogether.
The big advantage of DisplayPort over the other standards is the data transfer rate is much higher, and that it can carry sound. There's one other important advantage that DisplayPort has, and that is Freesync. Freesync keeps the monitor refresh rate in time with the graphics card refresh rate, which reduces image striping and tearing that sometimes occur when the monitor and graphics card are processing at
different speeds.
Nvidia has a similar standard to the FreeSynch standard, called G-synch. However Nvidia's standard is proprietary, while the AMD standard is open, so any manufacturer can the AMD standard without having to pay a royalty fee. It appears that the Freesync interface is currently a port on most monitors.
Anyway, I had a new higher end video card with a DisplayPort that could output crazy amounts of data to a monitor. However the monitor was a 15 year old Costco purchase, with a 24 inch screen and a 4:3 aspect ratio.
To take advantage of FreeSynch, I got a new 27 inch curved monitor that has DisplayPort, with a wide 16:9 aspect ratio. It has up to 144Hz refresh rate and a 1 millisecond response time. It has a noticeably cleaner image than the old display. It cost less than the old monitor did when new.
Below, the DisplayPort is purple.
The new monitor is much clearer and finer in detail than the old monitor. I'll put the old monitor in the shop and hook the laptop to it when I need to view a schematic or something.
Meanwhile I've installed a newly purchased version of MS Office 365.
I have a lot of games, too. Over the decades, I've collected many computer games, even if I don't have time to play them as much anymore.
Some of these games go back to the dark ages of PC gaming, like vintage DOS games. It's getting hard to run those old games on newer and newer Windows versions. Every time I build a new PC and find several games no longer work, I feel like a little bit of myself is lost. It's like when a normal person loses old family movie reels or videotapes.
The previous rig would play a few of these old games, but they would run in a tiny window on the big monitor screen. Happily the new video card seems to know how to handle old graphics with no effort on my part. Regardless of the original resolution of the old game, it still fills the monitor!
Below, one of the greatest games of all time, in full modern glory. Previous monitor.
Obligatory WoW screen shot. New monitor
This is one problem I can do nothing about: Slow internet. This game will probably take a week to download off Steam. One of many.
Rural living has some down-side. Like dial-up level internet speeds, with broadband prices.
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