Build a PC

I’m building perfectly acceptable office type machines for less than £200.

They are however not designed to be upgradable. If you need to add wireless I’m using these £11  600Mbps Dual Band 2.4G/5G AC600 Wireless Usb Network Adapters.

EDIT – the cheapest Ryzen on EB is £156 and the cheapest AM4 mobo is £64. The Kabylake 3.6Ghz Pentium G4600 can handle 4 threads for £87 and the cheapest mobo is also £64.

John, worrying about future proofing is a waste of time. When you are ready to upgrade the CPU they’ll not be made any more. Not a problem, it’s called EBay or Amazon ? I upgraded one of the charities old Sandybridge machines to a 3.1Ghz i5 for £65.

John, I have to be very honest unless you are on the gaming bleeding edge or running lots of scientific simulations you do not need a new rig. Until Microsoft sabotaged the Windows 10 beta I was very happy running a six years old box, and it would probably be still pretty usable now. My current box is five years old. It still runs the latest games (OK I had to swap out the gpu but nothing else). I do not plan to replace it for another couple of years and when I do that replacement is most likely to favour electricity savings rather than grunt.

Building a PC is no longer the challenge it was. Its just Lego with electronics.

Imo better to play with things that do not cost a lot but may make people say wow! For example a diy Hololens (sort-of) .

+1 for the SSD remark, but do make sure you continue to have good backups!

SSDs do not fail slowly like the hdd of JCD — they drop down dead as though they have been pole-axed. No warnings are given. You cannot even get a hint by looking at read/write error data as the controller can in some cases be the single point of failure.

John, once you’re on W10 you can forget all about recovery partitions. In W10 the reset option does the same job. By and large it’ll sort all your drivers out as well, in your case I’d say 100% of them.

If you’ve bought a key from E-Bay I’d just put the hard drive to one side and do a clean install of W10 on the SSD. Once it’s working you can copy the data from the old HDD then put it in a drawer just in case.

Anonymous wrote:

Not sure what you mean reset option in 10.

In W10, if you click on the Settings Cog, then click on Update and Security, you’ll see a option to “Reset this PC”. You can choose to keep all your files, or remove them. It’s a bit like a Rebuild my OS option, or wipe it all and load the OS from scratch, either self-repair or nuke and start again.

If you go to Settings – Updates & Security – Recovery you’ll see an option called Reset this PC.

This reinstalls Windows as if from a USB stick except that you can opt to save your data files. Any drivers and applications will need to be reinstalled, but these days Windows seems to do a good job on drivers itself.

I’m running W10 on many machines that are the dual core equivalent of your quad core J2900 and they are fine. But they all have SSDs (I only use spinners in servers these days). I also have a customer with the J2900 All In One desktop and that is running OK too.