I’ve had a couple of PCs in from that time when we were changing over and compatibility mode was what it was all about. All your bootable software tools still relied on MBR, apps like Rufus didn’t exist yet etc.
One of them had a Gigabyte motherboard with a dodgy ram slot, but an i5-2400 and HD5570. The other had a Biostar board and a Celeron, a real “value” build but had lasted nearly 8 years doing all it’s owner needed before running out of grunt and viable sectors on the HDD.
I had a 120GB SSD knocking about, could get ram up to 6GB and one of the 500GB spinners passed all it’s diagnostics so I had enough hardware to do something worthwhile, especially when a check on benchmarks showed the i5 comparable to a Ryzen 3 3200G.
Nightmare trying work out what the hell I did to make things boot back in the day. In the end I converted all drives to GPT, turned off any CSM and turned on Secure Boot. Sanity restored and W10 installed in what seemed like an age. Of course it wasn’t really that slow but I’ve got used used to NVMe drives and USB3 sticks. W10 didn’t barf at the age of anything and it’s still a very usable “office” machine. The PSU is a Coolermaster 500 watt which must have been bundled with the case as it’s well OTT, so I’m hoping for many more years out of it.
.
