Sabriena’s Desktop upgrades
Like many others, I’m incredibly unhappy with Windows 11’s dropping support for many machines causing either a mass-ewaste event or possibly a mass-transition to Linux. My money’s on the former. Sabriena, long getting the short end of the stick when it comes to computers, is using my old 7th gen Core i7 7700k, meaning she’s in that boat. Come October, no more support!
We briefly touched on the idea of switching her over to Linux - I didn’t have any trouble with it, save some games (mostly just GTA Online, if I’m being honest, which is annoying because it’s something Rockstar could totally do something about, they just don’t give a shit), but she’s not confident in it and doesn’t want me having to be tech support for her constantly.
So fuck it, we’ll have to build her a new machine, so about two months ago I started laying out what we’d need to buy, and thus began the negotiation of what she’d let me spend… on her… if I bumped it up too much, she’d probably try and give the new bits to Duncan and take his, but god damn it she’s always getting hand-me-downs!
Anyway, with the EOFY sales coming up, I figured it’d probably be a good time to take a look at it. This ended up being correct, as not only did we save a couple hundred bucks, but by going with a bundle from a local retailer, we ended up getting a better CPU, albeit with a worse motherboard than I’d originally picked… but not in any ways that really matter.
Anyway, the parts arrived earlier this week and we cracked her computer open and… fuck. The combination of her case, RAM, and the CPU cooler I picked (Noctua NH-D15g2, annoyingly replacing something more or less exactly the same only the g1 doesn’t fit AM5) meant it’s just a few mm too large to get the side on. Welp, we’ll have to replace her case at some point.
The rest of it came up fairly easily though. I’m not entirely happy with the temperatures (idling at about 55c, and bursting up to 85c in games, but apparently the AM5 stuff runs pretty spicy anyway?) but so far everything looks good.
Except fucking Windows won’t activate. It’s doing the bullshit that OEM versions do, where you get one change of motherboard (already done by her going from a Ryzen 1200 to my 7700k) and now it reckons that’s it you’ve had enough. The problem though is that this is not an OEM copy of Windows. Admittedly it’s a Dreamspark license, but I’m not sure why that would matter? None of the other licenses I’ve used from it seemed to give a shit, my desktop is running Windows 7 Pro, cross licensed all the way through to Windows 11 Pro, and I’ve swapped it over onto multiple different machines without issue.
Anyway, it’s basically just insult-to-injury that in addition to making us chuck out a perfectly good motherboard/cpu/ram (I mean, I’ll find something to do with it), now they want us to pay for the fucking OS as well?
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