Back in October 2025
I replaced my PC. After fourteen years of good service my old PC still worked just fine, but in October 2025
Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10, and there was no way to
upgrade the motherboard so that it was compatible with Windows 11. The
hardware was more than powerful enough to run Windows 11, but the motherboard
didn't have a TPM 2.0 security chip, and there was no way to add one, so I had
to replace the whole machine.
At the time I was annoyed. Confused. Even a little bit hurt. Microsoft usually has my best interests at heart, but sometimes my
faith is tested, and this was one of those times. It was a distressing period in my life. I don't like to think about it. However I now
realise that Microsoft was right all along. It wasn't Microsoft that was at fault. It was me. I was the problem.
Why? Because shortly after I upgraded my PC, memory prices skyrocketed. On 10
October 2025 I paid £40.99 for 16gb of memory, which seemed reasonable enough,
but within the space of six weeks or so the price went boom. As of 10 July
2026 the exact same memory is £108.99:
I like to think that Microsoft knew this in advance. Their decision to end
support of Windows 10 was a friendly way of nudging me into a new age. If only
I had listened to Microsoft and bought 32gb of memory, or 64gb. I could
have sold half of it a few weeks later and made a profit. So, thank you, Jyoti
Mishra. You pushed me to make a decision I was unable to make on my own. I
love you, Microsoft. I would like to be your tradwife. Chain me to the
kitchen. I don't mind, as long as you love me in return.
That is enough of Microsoft. Ordinarily, when I upgrade my PC, I end up
with some parts that I put to one side. I promise that I'll assemble the parts
into another PC, but I never do. Then I sell the parts on eBay. But not this
time. This time my new PC was almost a completely fresh build. The only things
I carried over were the mouse, keyboard, speakers, and GPU, because GPU prices have also gone through the roof, albeit that it happened a few years ago, and the culprit was Bitcoin rather than AI.
This left me with almost an entire second PC, so I decided to tart it up. It's
now entering retirement, but it deserves a fresh lick of paint. Here it is, as
it was when it was:
I assembled it back in 2011. I used the cheapest case I could find. It was built around an Intel i5-2500K, fitted into an ASRock H67M-GE motherboard - I wasn't interested in overclocking - with 8gb of memory, a hard drive of some description, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7. I wanted to jump from 32-bit Windows XP to the high-def age of 64-bit Windows 7. I wanted to jump from grainy Realmedia files of top 2000s porn legends Vanessa Blue and Aria Giovanni to crisp 1080p MP4 videos of Ana Foxxx and Mistress T, and also Aria Giovanni because she aged well. In fact she was hot in the 1990s. She is still hot. I did other things as well, but that was the main thing.
Aria Giovanni will never appear in lists of the most good-looking women of the 1990s or 2000s, because the media is far too embarrassed to write about porn stars. Nonetheless she was in the top tier, but I'm digressing here.
At first, back in 2011, I did without a GPU, because I wanted a big empty case with lots of
airflow, and I didn't envisage playing many games. That decision lasted about
six weeks before I caved in and bought a Geforce 9600. Over the years I added
an extra 4gb of memory, for a peculiar total of 12gb. I swapped the hard drive
for an SSD, and used the hard drive as a big dumb hunk of storage. I upgraded
the GPU again. Faced with the brutal demands of
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 in 2020 which is the year it came out that's 2020 I replaced the CPU with a Xeon 1275. Along the way I upgraded from Windows 7
to Windows 10.
The end result was a machine that had roughly the same power as a cylindrical
2013 Apple Mac Pro, but with a much more powerful graphics system. Sadly it has reached the
end of its upgrade path. There appears to be no way to modify an LGA 1155
system so that it's compatible with Windows 11. There were never any LGA 1155
motherboards with TPM 2.0, and there's no way to add a separate TPM 2.0 card because it needs low-level access to the BIOS. Still, the PC served me well for fourteen years.
It seems a shame to leave the machine gathering dust, so I decided to tart it
up. Firstly, a new case. The old case is a cheap thing I bought locally. It
was so old it had two slots for optical drives, plus a single USB slot on the
front. On reflection I may well have bought it for my even-older PC, which was built around
an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300, and kept it when I upgraded. Still, I emptied it out, this dusty box of dreams that has been my sexual partner for so long:
Given the fact that several generations have now grown up and lost their virginity to internet porn, you'd think that people would now associate keyboards and PCs with sexual arousal, and would thus become sexually aroused by PCs. But that hunk of aluminium stirs nothing inside me.
What to do with it? It has too many sharp edges to work as furniture. I
briefly thought about stuffing it full of hard drives, plus a power supply, a
couple of fans, and using it as some kind of RAID array. My old Mac mini sort
of fits into the case, and MacOS has built-in software RAID:
I would presumably need a bunch of SATA-USB adapters, plus a USB hub. But why?
What for? In the end I took it to the recycling centre and threw it away. Goodbye. But
not before buying a new case. It's the same IONZ KZ19 Spin case I bought for
my upgraded PC last year, for about £36:
As far as I can tell IONZ is one of those made-up=for-Amazon brands. Their website
doesn't even list the KZ19 Spin. But it's an interesting design and it feels
well-made, so why not. It comes with three free fans, two in the top and one
at the back.
The next step was to re-arrange the motherboard, power supply, and storage.
The old case has a conventional drives-at-the-front,
everything-else-at-the-back arrangement. The Spin, as is the modern style, has
the power supply in its own compartment in the base, hidden away with the
drives, although it also has space on the "back side" of the motherboard mount
for a bunch of solid state drives. This is where I put my aging, but still
healthy Samsung 850 EVO.
Remounting everything involved a lot of fiddly threading of the cables, and in
addition I had to raise the hard drive on little metal pegs so that there was
space for the SATA power plug, but in the end I managed to get it all to fit.
The RM750x is overspecified for the rest of the hardware. Why is it there?
As mentioned last year
my new PC was flaky, and in the process of debugging I ended up swapping all
of the components with my old PC to see which one was the weakest link.
In the end I determined that it was, to my surprise, the CPU, which is odd
because CPUs generally don't break. As a consequence my new PC has my old
Corsair RM550x power supply, and my old machine has a brand-new RM750x as a
kind of running spare.
I have said it before, but I am always nervous when photographing reflective
surfaces. What if I accidentally end up photographing a reflection of my own
naked body? And so whenever I photograph objects that are made of metal or
glass I crouch down in a large cardboard box, and I use a timer, plus a
polarising filter. Cardboard is not reflective.
While sitting in the box I decided to upgrade the machine lightly. Back in
2011 8gb of memory was plenty. I still have the receipt. It cost me £44.98
back then. I remember thinking that by the time I needed 16gb of memory, DDR3
would be old-fashioned. A few years later I found a pair of 2gb sticks going
cheap, so I added 4gb to the total, although I can't say that the machine ran
any faster. By far the most impactful non-GPU upgrade was the Samsung 850 EVO
SSD.
DDR3 has not been hit with the same price rises as DDR4, so I decided to
upgrade the memory. I was also worried about having mismatched RAM - it feels
dirty and wrong - so for the princely sum of £10.80 I bought four matching
sticks of Micron 4gb DDR3. Here's the original memory, a mixture of 4gb sticks
from Kingston and 2gb sticks from Micron:
And here are the replacements, looking very smart:
Did it make any difference to the machine's performance? Not at all! But it
did work, at the very least:
Why 15.7gb? I believe some of the memory is siphoned off for the CPU's built-in graphics chip. Which reminds me. My old machine no longer has a GPU. The Xeon E3-1275 V2 has a built-in Intel P4000, which is apparently just a different name for the Intel HD4000, which is fine for browsing the internet but only really suitable for playing late-2000 / early-2010s games at 1280x720.
I can't imagine using the machine for anything particularly demanding - I have
an entirely new PC for that - so I bought the cheapest decent entry-level GPU
I could find, an AMD Radeon RX550:
It takes up two spaces in the backplate, so I had to remove the 4xUSB 3 PCI
card you can see in the background. But it doesn't require extra power and it
runs quietly:
Then I had a go at XCOM: Enemy Within, which ran at 1080 at around 45fps:
True story: in the next action I ordered my soldier to fire at point-blank range at the flanked sectoid. Ordinarily this is a guaranteed kill, but in this case her bullets only did two units of damage. On the next turn the Sectoid scurried behind the nearby car and shot my soldier, killing her! I quit in a rage. That's X-Com, baby.
The newest game I own is The Talos Principle 2, which uses Unreal
Engine 5. UE5 is controversial for its use of AI to upscale low-resolution
frames, and its steep system requirements, and also its baffling range of
graphical options. In the case of Talos 2 no matter how I
played with the settings the end result looked weird, with grainy blurry
trails running behind moving objects.
Needless to say, with a simple entry-level card it ran poorly:
Knocking the resolution down to 1280x720 helped, but not much:
Albeit that even at 21fps the game would probably be playable. It's a contemplative puzzle game, not bloody Defender. I had forgotten how good-looking it is:
Alexandra Drennan, you magnificent bastard. You're dead! But you flung a light
into the future, and the flames caught.
EDIT: In the months since I wrote this
post I finally saw sense and removed the RX 550. I replaced it with the GTX
1650 it had beforehand, which is roughly four times more powerful:
For my main PC I bought a
second-hand GTX 1080, which is roughly twice as powerful as the GTX 1650
despite being three years older. It requires auxiliary power and takes up a
lot more space, but it has twice as much memory. It doesn't have ray-tracing,
though, so I still can't play Doom: The Dark Ages.
As mentioned up the page I upgraded from the original i5-2500K to a Xeon
because I wanted to do justice to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
That game is unusual, in that it taxes the entire machine - the GPU, the CPU,
the internet connection, and the storage - and its performance can't be easily
improved by just stuffing a new GPU into the case.
As a final touch I wasn't keen on having a glass panel - I know what's inside
the machine, and I don't like the idea of turning it into a greenhouse - so I
painted it with some B&Q Antibes blue paint, with a layer of varnish on
top. It probably won't last (the glass is flexible) but it does the job:
Looking at the photo, I think I need to add another coat. I had some masking
tape and orange paint, so around the back I gave it a Designer's
Republic-inspired dash of colour, which has some ropey masking but nothing
that can't be touched up.
Power consumption? My elderly quad-core Xeon 1275-powered PC idles at around
54w, when playing some music and with Firefox open, but ramps up to 100-120w
when playing XCOM: Enemy Within. My new, also quad-core i3-12100F
idles at 45w, going up to 74w when running XCOM: EW, which it
launches faster and plays at a higher frame rate. So, it does more stuff while
consuming less power. Doom: Eternal on my i3, at modest
settings, at 1080p, with a Geforce 1650, hovers around 100w.
In contrast my 10-core, Xeon E5-2690-powered 2013 Mac Pro idles at around 65w,
and it can't play XCOM: Enemy Within because MacOS dropped
support for 32-bit applications a long time ago. I think the lesson is that if
you want to save money, using a decade-old server-class Xeon is a bad idea.
And that is how I tarted up my old Windows 10 PC. The total cost was £36 for
the case, £28 for the GPU, £10.80 for the memory, plus an afternoon slotting
everything together. Ordinarily I bill my time at just over £200 an hour, but
in this case it was a learning experience, so the total cost was around £75 to
turn a worn old PC into a smart-looking PC that performs about as well as a
mid-2010s smartphone but with a massively higher power draw. In a world where
a brand-new Mac mini is £599, that money would feel like a waste, but sadly we
live in a world where a brand-new Mac mini is now £799.
It still runs Windows 10. It would almost certainly run Linux just fine, but I
have no need for a file server, and I have no plans to learn Python. The
machine itself runs slightly warmer than its Intel i3-12100F-powered
successor. With my new PC I only need to connect up the rear case fan to keep
it cool, whereas the older Xeon benefits from having one of the case-top fans
activated as well. As pictured above the stock Intel cooler looks like a joke, but then again it worked without fuss for fourteen years.
Does it have a use? Pragmatically it has a bunch of stuff
installed that I still use occasionally, and it's not so old that it's just a
pointless power hog. With two PCs that have the same case I could of course
make a nice coffee table.
