It's a fourteen-year-old PC. I built it from parts back in 2011. Have you ever
taken a photograph of your living room, and when you look at the picture everything look ugly and you can see all the dirt? I have the same
feeling right now. The PC looks grotty on the outside, and it also looks pretty grotty on the inside, but for most of the last fourteen years it has been the tool
of my writing trade.
Back in 2011 I wanted to leap into the world of 64-bit computing, so I bought a bunch of parts and stuffed them into a case. Goodbye 32-bit Windows XP and 4gb of
memory and postage-stamp-sized videos of top internet porn legend Aria
Giovanni, hello 64-bit Windows 7 Pro, 16gb, and full-screen 1080p videos of
top internet porn legend Ana Foxxx, or Foxx, I'm not sure how many X's she has
in her name.
Back in 2011 it had an Intel i5-2500K, which was an excellent CPU that
remained relevant for years afterwards. At the time AMD was going through a bad
patch and Intel was top dog. I replaced it in 2020 with an Intel Xeon E3-1275 V2, so I
could eke a little bit more life out of the machine. As of today it runs
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 fast enough at 1080 that it's fun to
play.
Foxxx. Three Xs.
During the 2010s I replaced the hard drive with an SSD, upgraded the
graphics card to a middle-of-the-road Geforce GTX 1650, added some black tape
to cover up the lack of blanking plates, and smeared some paint on the case
because I had some spare paint.
I also upgraded Windows 7 to Windows 10, which was free. I had nothing against
Windows 8 - it ran perfectly fine on my ThinkPad X61 - but it didn't make a lot of
sense in a desktop machine. The result is a PC that would have been state
of the art in 2013, roughly on the same level of performance as one of the
cylindrical Mac Pro models.
It's still usable nowadays, but there's a problem. The 2011-era motherboard
doesn't have the necessary security chip to run Windows 11, so the machine
is forever stuck with Windows 10, and on 14 October 2025 Microsoft stopped
supporting Windows 10:
It feels strange, downloading the last update of an operating system. I have a couple of old
PowerPC Macintoshes that are forever stuck with OS X 10.5, and occasionally
I power them up and check to see if there are any updates. There are none,
although apparently there is a way to run an early build of OS X 10.6 on
them.
There was a time when a fourteen-year-old PC would have been obsolete junk.
The original IBM PC would have been fourteen years old in 1995. There may
have been a few machines still running Lotus 123 and
WordStar in offices here and there, but Duke Nukem 3D or
Quake would have been beyond them. In the age of Unreal and
Half-Life the 286, 386, and 486 would have been similarly adrift.
A fast original Pentium machine from 1995 would have been far behind the
curve in 2009, which was the age of
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and high-def video. But the pace of
change slowed down in the multi-core age. A PC built in the early 2010s
isn't all that old-fashioned. My fourteen-year-old PC is still perfectly
capable of running modern games at modest settings. I reviewed
The Talos Principle 2
and
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
on this very machine, and had fun while doing so. I even started to review
The Outer Worlds, which came out in 2019, but mid-way through I
switched to my new PC.
Back in 2011 I chose 64-bit Windows 7 Pro because the Pro version had XP
Mode, which was a virtual machine that ran XP. I never used it, but it might
have been handy. I upgraded in place to Windows 10 Pro when it came out in
2015. Microsoft originally announced that Windows 10 would be the last
version of Windows, and that in future they would continually update it,
along the lines of Apple's MacOS. But the company obviously changed its
mind, because in 2021 it released Windows 11, and in 2023 it announced the
end of support for Windows 10 as of October 2025.
Which was awkward, because as of this writing - mid-October 2025 -
Windows 10 is still installed on around 45% of PCs running Windows. Back
when Windows XP was a thing Microsoft had to push back the retirement date
because it was so popular - netbooks gave it a renewed lease of life - but
this time the company has held up its hand and said "enough".
Ordinarily I would upgrade, but my Asrock H67M-GE motherboard is just too old. With no
way to install Windows 11 my PC has suddenly reached
the end. It still works, and will continue to work, but Windows 10 is the end.
Windows 7 Pro cost me £162 in 2011, and Windows 10 was a free upgrade, so
for £11 a year I got to play XCOM: Enemy Within as much as I liked,
which I suppose was worth it, but the forced obsolescence is still
annoying, and yes I realise that Enemy Within was actually released
in 2013, but humour me.
What are the options? Amazon has a bunch of tiny little mini PCs for
around £160 that run Windows 11. They're based around the Intel N95
low-power CPU. They have roughly the same CPU performance as my aging,
power-hungry Intel Xeon, which is humbling, but they're reliant on the
N95's built-in graphics processor, which is less powerful than the
discrete card in my PC. It strikes me that a mini PC would be a dead end.
It'll be junk in fourteen years.
I could of course switch entirely to a Mac Mini, and the new M4 Minis are
very tempting, but it would be nice to play
XCOM: Enemy Within every now and again. So, new PC.
Intel or AMD? Over the years the two companies have
tussled. The first PC I built myself had an Intel Celeron 300A,
which could be overclocked to run as fast as a 450mhz Pentium II by
putting sellotape on one of the pins. It was sweet! I used it throughout
the Pentium II and III eras, but replaced it with an AMD Duron in
the early 2000s, because the Pentium 4 was a poor deal. The Pentium 4
relied on expensive, proprietary RAMBUS memory and was less efficient than
AMD's designs.
AMD was hot in the early 2000s. The modern 64-bit version of the x86
architecture was AMD's doing. For a while it seemed that AMD was The
Future. But Intel came back in the mid-2000s with the Pentium M and Core
Duo, and my next machine was an Intel Core II Duo, I forget the
model. I upgraded it towards the end of its life. I replaced it with the
i5-2500k mentioned above. AMD went through a terrible patch in the
2010s with its Bulldozer architecture, which was inefficient and
power-hungry, but over time Intel lost its mojo and AMD rose again in 2011
with Ryzen.
As of 2025 AMD is the internet favourite, and their chips tend to be
slightly better value, but ironically their popularity is such that I
couldn't find a good motherboard at a cheap price, so I picked Intel.
The general process of building a PC hasn't changed much since 2011. The
main difference is the normalisation of SSDs. In 2011 they were exotic. Then
they were super-fast boot drives. Then M2 came along and SSDs became tiny.
Now it's entirely feasible to have an all-SSD system. Otherwise SATA, PCI,
the general concept of RAM sticks, the CPU mounts, are all at least
conceptually the same. I settled on the following system:
- Intel i5-12600K CPU
- MSI H610M-E motherboard
- Crucial P310 M2 1TB SSD
- Corsair RM750x PSU, which is ludicrously overspecified but was cheap
- 16gb Silicon Power DD4
- Cooler Master Hyper 411 heatsink
- iONZ KZ19 Spin case
This came to a total cost of £461.40. Looking back through my old
emails, that's about £50 cheaper than the i5-2500K machine I built in 2011.
The new machine has twice the memory, four times the CPU power, and an SSD
that has the same capacity but is much faster.
Here's the case:
It has a bunch of built-in fans. Thankfully no coloured lights. My
plan was to set up the machine with the CPU's integral graphics, and then
think about a graphics card later. I like a big empty case with lots of
airflow. Could I have saved a bit of money? I could have reused my existing
Corsair RM550x PSU (-£109.99), picked a cheaper CPU (-£50 or so), and
settled for a 500GB SSD (-£10) for around
£290 in total. That's not much more
than a pre-built mini PC.
Assembling the components was easy, although I hit a stumbling block early
on with the M2 SSD. M2 drives have to be screwed into place, otherwise they flip
up, but it took me an age to find the tiny tiny standoff screw. After that
the process was M2 SSD, RAM sticks, CPU, CPU cooler in that order.
Then there was the rigmarole of fitting this into the case,
and connecting up the power and reset switches. In the following image the
back of the PC is towards the right, and the PSU fits into the basement
section, sucking air in through the back and ejecting it downwards onto the
table.
Physical hard drives also go in the basement, but on the left. The case has
screw mounts for SSDs underneath the motherboard, either screwed into the
back of the machine, or mounted in a little bracket, viz:
It wasn't long before it was all assembled. The same case is also
available with a wraparound mesh cover. In retrospect I have no idea why I
picked glass. Was it slightly cheaper? I can't remember.
Then, the moment of truth. I turned it on, then held down DEL to enter the
bios and check out the temperatures, which were nice and low:
Bear in mind that my regular PC is a 2012 Mac Mini, which runs
normally at around 50 degrees centigrade, up to 60-70 when playing video.
I then installed Ubuntu, just to see if it all worked, and also to check out the
temperatures while running, which again were fine:
There was one curious thing, though. It froze. As in, completely
locked up, out of the blue. Frozen mouse cursor, no response. Linux doesn't
usually crash that badly.
At this point I'll share something with you. There appears to be a CPU
shortage, so I picked a used i5-12600K from Amazon's warehouse. CPUs don't
break, do they? They're sealed up. In all the years I've been tinkering with
PCs, the only outright hardware failures I've had were a hard drive and a
motherboard. Ubuntu freezing up must have been a one-off glitch.
With the PC assembled I bought a physical copy of Windows 11. On the one
hand Microsoft's decision to give up on Windows 10 is annoying, but on the
other hand I like Microsoft Flight Simulator, so there is that.
Microsoft has treated me badly, but perhaps I can change Microsoft.
Windows 11 Professional has a bunch of enterprise management tools but
otherwise doesn't have a compelling raison d'etre for a home user, so
I picked Windows 10 Home. It comes on a USB stick, which is fair enough
given that my new PC doesn't even have an optical drive, but no amount of
packaging will ever make USB sticks feel like a premium product. There is apparently an DVD version, but it's only available for companies, not individuals.
Installation was a breeze - until it wasn't:
To my surprise Windows bluescreened during the installation process. Then
recovered, then bluescreened again. Each time with a different error
message. IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL. Something about memory management.
Something about the kernel. Something about drivers. With persistence I
managed to install Windows 11, but connecting to the internet and
downloading the service pack caused it to bluescreen again and again. I
could reach the desktop, but it was flaky.
There followed a frustrating weekend. I swapped PSUs, to no avail. It
appeared that both PSUs were fine. I ran
Memtest86, but the
RAM passed. The SSD appeared to be a-ok. I tried installing Windows 11 with
a discrete graphics card, but it still froze. I installed Windows 10 and got
as far as playing
XCOM: Enemy Within, but after a while it froze. I
updated the motherboard firmware and BIOS, then tried running the memory at
a lower clock speed, but it froze, each time with a new bluescreen code. I
downloaded the Windows 11 installation media and tried installing it that
way, but no dice.
The problem must have been the motherboard, so I returned it for a
replacement. Two days later I reassembled the PC, installed Windows 11...
and it froze again. What jiggery-pokery is this? Was something touching the
side of the case and shorting out? Did I have fake RAM chips that passed the
tests but only had half the capacity?
Could it be the CPU? The CPU? Et tu, CPU?
Really? Some of Intel's more recent CPUs have a bug that causes them to draw
too much power, which slowly damages them, but the i5-12600K seems to be
unproblematic. Nonetheless after eliminating everything else I was perilously close
to blaming it on bad electricity or bad air, so I returned the CPU and
bought a considerably less capable i3-12100F instead.
The i3-12100 has four cores vs ten in the 12600, and it doesn't have a built-in graphics chip. It's still over twice as
powerful as my Xeon 1275 and uses less power, but it's a definite step down from a 12600K. It will however play XCOM: Enemy Within at max settings.
After reassembling everything again the i3-12100F chugged into life. Windows
11 installed, didn't crash, it installed the updates, it continued to not
crash. I downloaded Firefox, Steam, Speedfan, iCloud, a bunch of other
stuff, and Windows continued to work.
Activating Windows 11 on this new machine was annoying, because activation was tied to
the previous motherboard, which I had returned, but after entering a huge
string of numbers into my mobile phone's keypad I managed to sort that out.
For some reason Windows 11's "activate by phone" menu doesn't have the
United Kingdom. It stops at Palau. For the record the correct telephone
number is 0800 0188 354, as of October 2025, and you need to select one of
the countries in the drop-down menu in order to show your device ID.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so I installed The Outer Worlds
and played it for a bit, then I wrote this blog post, and Windows 11
continued to work. I'll write about Windows 11 separately. It has a curious
mixture of pointless-but-hip features that put me in mind of Active Desktop
and push technology, remember that? From Windows 95? Push technology? You could have news
feeds on the desktop. It didn't take off in the 1990s, but the industry has now decided
to make it happen again. Also, why in the name of living heck does Notepad have
embedded AI? It's a text editor.
Some of the menus date back to Windows 95. Technically the following menu is the Screen
Saver dialogue, but don't tell me they didn't just take Windows 95's display
settings screen and tweak it a bit:
Oh, the fonts are new, but I recognise Windows 95 when I see it.
Right-click a hard drive, select "properties", and look at all those tabs.
Two layers of them. That's Windows 95 all right.
XCOM: Enemy Within, running on Windows 11 on my new PC.
It's ironic. When Apple released OS X fans of Windows laughed at the trendy
Aqua interface, with its buttons that looked like droplets of water. But modern
MacOS is visually clean, and functionally almost indistinguishable from
mid-2000s OS X 10.4, which is great, because it gets out of the way.
Meanwhile Windows is still messy, with traces of Windows 95 lurking here and
there, and features spread across different control panels. The mouse
speed is controlled with one panel, but the mouse cursor is controlled with
another, and fixing some problems requires delving into the Windows 95-era,
perhaps even Windows 3.1-era device manager.
What year will it be, fourteen years from now? No-one knows. In 2011 smartphones were here to stay, the iPad was a year old, and it seemed that the x86 architecture and Windows were safe for the foreseeable future. However fourteen years later Apple has successfully demonstrated that ARM will work on the desktop, Intel is in a terminal death spiral, Windows itself seems to be drifting ARM-wards, laptops are mostly on a par with desktop machines, held back only by weak graphics, and it's entirely possible that computers fourteen years hence will be dumb terminals streaming everything from the internet.
I'm reasonably confident that my PC will still be relevant - if Microsoft drops x86 support tomorrow it'll still take several years for it to fade away - and of course my PC is ripe for upgrades, because it has an i3. In the next post, let's see how Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 works on this new machine. There's a sequel, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but I'm not made of money. Let's try Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. If the machine can survive that, it'll survive anything.
