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190 points owenmakes | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.599s | source

Coming back with my own blog (hosted on iPad 2) after asking here the same question
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doodlebugging ◴[] No.45154873[source]
I've been considering getting a new(er) iPad or iMac. I think it might have a better interface with my iPhone than my current pc. I hate to think about product lifespan, obsoleting, etc since I already have lots of devices that aged out.

Reading this guy's tale just made me appreciate how awesome it is to be sitting here posting on my Dell T5400 from 2008 running Win7Pro. It still runs even though there are 3 blown caps and 3 swollen caps on the mobo, and one RAM slot crapped out several years ago so I lost access to 8 GB of RAM in my 32 GB system. One of the PCie slots is also bad but so far the one with my 1070 GPU works fine driving two monitors. The only real problem is with the hard drive. Every so often I get a hardware error on the Win7Pro installation (I dual-boot Win10 Pro on this machine) and that sends me into a multiple hour reboot fest where I have to run Startup Repair several times, go Command Line in and fix MBR errors, and scannow to fix whatever else is borked.

At one point I spent a week on Win10 Pro (I hate that OS) because after hours of trying to force Win7 Pro to boot normally it looked hopeless. After a week of that I made the huge mistake of clicking the "install updates now" button on Win10 Pro and it proceeded to grab several years worth of updates and install them, rebooting multiple times in the process. It may have finished except that one of those updates left me with a hardware bluescreen related to a driver for the 1070 and I was not able to get that fixed.

After much frustration and the spewing of several one-time use profanity clusters I decided to try to boot into Win7 Pro again and it worked normally.

One day this machine will bork itself and I will have to accept that I can no longer operate in my beloved Win7 and have to fire up this new pc that has been sitting idle for four years now. That day is not today though.

replies(1): >>45156411 #
incone123 ◴[] No.45156411[source]
Unless you enjoy rebooting, why not run Windows 7 in a VM on newer hardware?
replies(1): >>45158302 #
1. doodlebugging ◴[] No.45158302[source]
Hmmmm. I had not considered this. I guess I am in a rut with more than one project going all the time so I never took the time to look for other options.

I did buy a new pc several years ago when the T5400 started to have problems on reboot and I found a couple of bad caps. I figured it was only a matter of time. Oddly enough that still seems to be true.