So, my work machine was getting long in the tooth. Occasionally not booting and requiring me to jiggle memory sticks or tighten CPU cooler screws. It was a DDR3 machine with a Xeon E3 1230V2 with 8gb of RAM (and oddly enough an RTX 2060.) The fans were getting pretty loud, too.
I had a Ryzen 2600x and 16gb of DD4 from my home PC lying around, so I bought a cheap mainboard, tore the old one out of the case, attached all the hardware to the new mainboard - including the SSD with Mint installed - and BOOM! It booted first try without issue. Even going from Intel to AMD, DDR3 to DDR4. My mind is blown!
I can’t imagine how borked my machine would have been if I’d tried that with Windows.
Now, what do I do with a still-working Xeon and mainboard?!?
I know some of y’all like to bash Windows at every chance, but except for the activation it’s portable as well and the OS wouldn’t normally break. You can put your Windows SSD into other computers and it will boot just fine. This might have been different with Windows 7 and earlier versions, but as of Windows 8 it’s smooth sailing.
You can boot windows from a USB stick if you really want. It’s even branded. “Windows to go”.
That’s good to know. I suppose most of us not knowing this is a good indicator of the average age around here. I think the last time I installed Windows from scratch was 7…