It's Been 9 Years!

NETWizz

NETWizz

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Okay, so until this past week, it has been nine (9) years since I last performed a clean install of Windows on my home desktop computer!

You must be thinking the computer must be very old... well yes and no.

Back then it had 3x Western Digital 250 GB SATA (or SATA II) hard drives in RAID 5 on an ASUS 780i with SLI and an Intel Core 2 Duo...

Then I upgraded to two 1.5 TB drives and put them in a mirror... I then made an image with ImageX and restored it to the two 1.5 TB drives in a mirror simplifying things. Later, I got an Intel motherboard with the Core i7 and did a Sysprep then swapped the motherboard, CPU, and RAM reducing to one video card. Then later I swapped the DVD burner for a Blue Ray drive and burner...

It stayed like this for years. Then in that time, I had one hard drive fail. I replaced them both with newer SATA III 1.5 TB WDC black drives doing the replacement one drive at a time, so they matched. I also bought new SATA III cables for good measure to upgrade all of those as well at the same time.

Fast forward, I had both a power supply and a video card failure at separate points, so those got replaced.

I accidentally installed Windows 10 when it was asking me and it woke up from sleep. Apparently I confirmed it on the keyboard because it said do not shut off do not unplug... etc.

Then the computer got Bitlocker installed after upgrading to Windows 10.

A fan went bad, and I replaced it. The UPS battery went bad a second time, so I replaced the entire UPS unit. The laser printer was worn out, so I replaced that. Recently had another failed mouse a couple years ago and replaced that.

*******

^^^ All the same base install! You can tell I hate to do installs!


Long story short, I bought a new SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD (whatever that means; I don't know), but it's way fast.

I backed up everything, I removed the drives, changed from RAID to AHCI, and I changed from BIOS to UEFI... Installed the new SSD on a 3.5" drive bay mounting bracket. Made a new USB memory stick with Windows 10 and booted that via the UEFI boot by pressing F10 for a menu.

The computer is WAY fast now! It feels like a brand, new computer.
 
I try to do a refresh every year.

I always tell myself I won't install all types of junk on my main PC and will use my test PCs but that never happens.

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk
 
SSD's just make everything so much faster no matter what system it seems like. I just had someone in the last month that does a lot of DJing with an older Asus laptop as his main machine for it. It was stupidly slow to boot like over 5 minutes before you could attempt to use it. I just cloned to a 1 Tb samsung ssd and all was well again. Booted in around 30-40 seconds tops and was good to work with immediately. Saved him from hours of aggravation setting up a new machine again from scratch.
 
Long story short, I bought a new SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD (whatever that means; I don't know), but it's way fast.

:oops: I think I even know lol. Question is...how big?
 
Because size matters...

It is 1.024 TB, lol it actually says that.


Bought it at Best Buy because they had it on sale for lime $139. It was funny checking out they kept trying to sell me the 1 TB Samsung one for $199 telling me “it’s our fastest.” I was like, “I doubt it’s any different.”


... so the sales guy goes to pull up the Specs online, and they are identical, lol... but he assured me only his best computers come with the Samsung that they are the best.

I just said, “ I don’t care nor even need the best. The computer it’s going on is probably 7 years old.” Please sell me the one I want instead of trying to bait and switch me to the Samsung.

******

No regrets it’s so much faster. To get more out of it I probably need a new motherboard. It also has a 5 year warranty, which is the minimum amount of use I expect to get out of it. Realistically I will probably run it 7 to 10 years and half way through it will find itself in a new motherboard.
 
Altster said:
That won't last long. Give it time and it will start to get slower and slower and slower and......
Click to expand...


No it will be fine for a while. Heck I have a 2010 laptop I still use and it boots fast and easily browses the Internet, configures switches, opens PDF documents, word processes, prints, and plays videos. It’s had an SSD since 2011 or 2012. I did drop that laptop on it’s audio port a year ago and broke a plastic collar, but it’s been fine. This year I last weekend dropped it again and now it’s hanging on by a thread... it’s an Inspiron 1564... I am considering dropping $20 for a new audio board, lol.

I am a cheapskate.
 
I legit couldn't stop laughing when I saw all the upgrades and stuff that went on with your PC without doing a fresh install. I did a clean install last September when I upgraded to Windows 10 since then I have upgraded my CPU and other things. I wanna do a fresh install and I was thinking about doing it yesterday, but I'll hold off for a couple more weeks. So much easier to do when it is a client lol
 
I've done quite a few over the years.

I've had three main machines since 2006.

An AMD Operton 165 based desktop with 2GB ram featuring windows XP. I think that machine saw upgrades to both Vista and 7 before I retired it in the spring of 2010.

I then build an Intel Core i7 930 based desktop featuring 6GB of ram 3x2GB and it's OS was windows 7 and then windows 8. I only just retired that machine back about a year ago now, but for the life of me I can't remember if I had windows 10 on the i7 930 machine before I retired it. I want to say I loaded 10 on it when my WD Blue drive started acting up in like 2015. 5 years out of a blue is nothing to sneeze at! I know this machine probably had about 4 if not 5 OS reloads on it. 7 probably twice, then 8.1 and at least 10 once.

Then I have the new Ryzen 7 machine I built last August. I think I only installed the OS on it twice so far. The first time I had some real instability issues that I think were the result of using a pretty old Win 10 installer. Updated to the most recently release, reinstalled, and things worked MUCH better. Much more reliable.

All in all I think I'd be closing in on 10 OS reloads since 2006. Almost 1 per year! Any time I do major hardware changes I like to reinstall. Especially now with SSD's... and how fast Win 10 installs. Unless you have a very complicated setup, it's just better to nuke and pave that bad boy.
 
Porthos said:
Wait till 1809 next month.;)
Click to expand...
Nooooooooooooo!!
I just finished gutting this damn thing to get it to work how I want it to! Took the hatchet to it and got it running super slick!
I suppose they'll put everything back that I've killed !
All those services...apps...settings....policies...:eek::eek::eek::eek::confused::mad:
 
NETWizz said:
It was funny checking out they kept trying to sell me the 1 TB Samsung one for $199 telling me “it’s our fastest.” I was like, “I doubt it’s any different.”


... so the sales guy goes to pull up the Specs online, and they are identical, lol... but he assured me only his best computers come with the Samsung that they are the best.

I just said, “ I don’t care nor even need the best. The computer it’s going on is probably 7 years old.” Please sell me the one I want instead of trying to bait and switch me to the Samsung.
Click to expand...

To be fair, he probably did honestly think it was a better deal/drive. I don't think it was a sales bait and switch type of thing, I don't think they get any kind of commission or anything on SSD sales.

Best Buy electronics salesmen are usually just college kid tech enthusiasts, and are prone to fanboyism. The internet loves Samsung SSDs (not without reason) but some people fanboy so hard over them that they think any other option is trash.

Good on you for sticking to your choice, and welcome to the wonderful world of solid state storage! It was always fun to show people the difference in how fast their machine boots up with an SSD.
 
Can you really buy a 1 TB Samsung one for $199 from BB
thought they cost a lot more
nearly bought a 1 TB Sandisk SSD last week for $180 but it was from Craig's list
I have always used Samsung
 
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