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Windows 10 EOL
June 17th, 2025 (permalink)
So Microsoft decided to produce tons of e-waste for no obvious reason. There's a lot of capable hardware out there, and it would be of software company's interest to support as much hardware as possible. Instead, they made some arbitrary reason to deprecate "old" hardware. At the same time they also turned all of windows VR headsets into garbage. We'll have to wait for the open source implementations to catch up for any hope of them being usable again. From what I read, there's some certificate issues in the way there, but maybe there's some hope. We'll see.
I've found myself in a situation where I'm the admin for 5 laptops, 3 desktop systems and 2 NUCs within the family. Except for the NUCs, all of which were running windows 10. (One NUC is running Debian, the other already had win11).
Son's PC was new enough that it just needed a BIOS tweak and it upgraded to windows 11.
Wife's PC was too old for windows 11, and had some motherboard damage (using network through an USB dongle, stuff like that), so I just ordered a new relatively cheap desktop PC. Not a beast, but more than good enough to run games. This came from verkkokauppa.com, of all places. I did shop around and they happened to have a no-brand prebuilt with decent specs. I was positively surprised by the build quality, cable management and everything.
My PC was technically new enough for win11, but I didn't feel comfortable not having a working system for a while, so after long, long contemplation decided to buy a new PC for myself as well. And if I was getting a new PC, it would have to be an upgrade. My old system has ryzen7 2700 with 8 cores. So the base had to be "more than 8 cores". I compared what's available at the moment and both Intel and AMD have "more than 8 cores" consumer systems at comparable prices and comparable performance. Intel's solution has big and little cores while AMD's solution has all big cores.
I contemplated the pros and cons of each from a developer perspective - on one hand it would be interesting to test with a system that has different sized cores... and on the other hand, I'd probably have fewer issues overall with a "all cores are the same" system. So in the end I went with the Ryzen 9900x 12 core system. I also opted for 64 gigs of memory, in hopes that I wouldn't need to upgrade for several years. Maybe a GPU update at some point.
This came from Takomo, a small local company that builds high end gaming PCs. I was positively surprised about them at almost every step. The web store has a computer builder which gives information about every part you choose. They contacted me afterwards offering advice if I was building a gaming PC (likely to suggest more cooling and beefier GPU). The computer arrived on time, extremely well packaged, with some clearly labelled boxes for spare parts, PSU cables and candy. The build quality looks top notch, and the only little glitch was that the OS was in Finnish. Not that reinstalling the OS was a big deal compared to all the migration setup I had to do.
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