I found a Dell Inspiron 3670 at Repowered. 16 GB DDR4 RAM, a 512 GB NVMe SSD, Windows 11 Pro for about $300. I need to get some experience with Windows 11, so I bought it. It is working out quite well for me.

Windows 11 is not too different from Windows 10, but a lot of things have been moved around. My Windows experience goes back to 3.1, so I am quite used to these version changes. I am confident I will be able to work well with Windows 11 as well. It seems a little harder to get Microsoft Edge and OneDrive out of the way than with Windows 10, but that is really just a nuisance. These days I use Windows mainly when there is no Linux equivalent for the application I want, something that is becoming less and less common as the years go by.

After verifying that the system would boot and going through some of my Windows configuration steps I shut it down and opened it up. There were two slots for RAM, each occupied by an 8 GB DIMM. I hope to replace those with 16 GB DIMMs. There were two PCIe slots. I promptly filled one with a USB 3 PCIe card which I had lying around. This gave me two additional USB 3.x ports beyond the two built in to the system, which also has four USB 2 ports. I also found SATA cables inside. I connected one pair of those to a 1 TB SATA SSD which I also had lying around. I attached this SSD to the system case with duct tape. The idea here was to use this SSD for Linux, so I would not have to do much to the built in NVMe SSD that housed Windows. The SATA drive has enough space that I can fit one or two other Linux distributions on it if I want to.

Having a drive for Linux, I tried to install Debian 12 on it. This installation failed: One of the steps encountered an error which I could not get around. At this point I disabled the UEFI setting for secure boot. I verified that the system would still boot Windows, then went ahead and installed Ubuntu 24.04. I put the root, home, and swap partitions on the SATA SSD. The installer put /boot/efi in the EFI partition of the NVMe drive, as I expected. I verified that the system would boot into both Windows and Linux, and then went through my Linux configuration steps.

I had an uncomfortable time when I realized that the colors on this system were not displaying properly.It was not the monitor: That worked perfectly when connected to another system. The problem went away when I replaced the VGA cable. Good. I was having nightmarish thoughts about the onboard VGA port being bad.