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?!?
Start a self-hosted server. You’re welcome to join !selfhost@lemmy.ml or !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
That’s a great idea! I have an old HDD and a 300 watt PSU lying around somewhere. I suppose I could just mount it all on a board.
I have swapped Linux SSDs with Mint and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed between an AMD desktop PC, an Intel desktop and an Intel laptop and never had any problems. They just boot up and work. Even the NVIDIA card in one of the desktops didn’t cause any real problems.
If you tried this with Windows, the OS would break, even if it booted at all, and the software licenses would all become invalid even if you could fix it up technically. You’d spend days fixing driver problems and teaching it to find its own partitions. Linux is amazingly portable.
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.
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…
Short reply: Me too.
Long reply: I just talk about Windows a little bit, as I remembered.
Me too. And it was a dual boot on my Ubuntu back then, when we even didn’t have Steam on Linux or was very early. Later I took the free upgrade to Windows 10, but at that time I wasn’t using it much anymore. Year after year I just booted Windows just to update everything, “in case” I would need it. But I did not and eventually removed it completely after this slow process of getting rid of Windows entirely. Nowadays I’m on an Arch based system and don’t even think to go back.
… man I just remembered that I switched to Linux in 2008, when Windows Vista was the newest shit on the market and I completely removed Windows XP back then (which was a pirated version BTW). But immediately I came back to Win7 after years as described earlier.
Linux is amazingly portable.
So I’m discovering! I might just have to install Linux on my home machine, but I’ve been running Windows for so long, I really worry I’m going to break something in that case. I also do a lot of audio production with that machine, and software compatibility might end up being a big problem.
Free drivers to free drivers are easy. The only issues usually occur when you move from Nvidia to something else. Nvidia graphics drivers interfere with free drivers.
I used my Xeon E3 1230V3 with 16gb of DDR-3 and a GTX 1070 up until summer of last year. And I was gaming on it! But recently build a complete new AMD+AMD machine and it’s still there. And I wonder if the SSD with the OS would work when I plug it in a new machine. I always install from scratch in such cases, but can understand the appeal to just change the hardware without all the software work involved. Pretty neat!
So what to do with the old machine? To be honest, no idea. For the performance you get it takes lot of power. So not sure if its worth it anymore, compared to modern hardware. I could use it for creating comparisons and benchmarks or to test software (I wrote). Maybe strip out the graphics card and use it as a server?
requiring me to jiggle memory sticks or tighten CPU cooler screws
How much vibration is the computer subjected to? Do you live in a limestone quarry?
Worse. A classroom.
