My backup desktop system, an old HP SFF box, failed. It was running Windows 10, Ubuntu 24.04, and Debian 12. Somehow it stopped booting correctly. GRUB would not show all the systems. My boot repair drive failed to fix it. I replaced the SATA SDD drive, but that did not help. So I replaced it with another SFF desktop for a cost of $35.

The replacement was an HP EliteDesk 800 G1 Small Form Factor PC, similar to the old system. I bought it from Free Geek Twin Cities and they threw in a monitor and keyboard as well. This machine, like its predecessor, cannot run Windows 11. Since Windows 10 goes out of support in October, Free Geek has replaced it with Linux Mint 21 on all of the systems they sell that cannot run Windows 11. That was OK with me, especially at that price. I am quite comfortable with Linux and I do have another system that runs Windows 11 when I really need a Windows system, e.g. for TurboTax.

Other characteristics:

• No optical drive. No problem. I have a couple USB CD/DVD drives which I can plug in if needed.
• Only 8 GB RAM. No problem. The old machine had 32 GB which was compatible with the new one. So I cannibalized it.
• Storage was a 512 GB mechanical hard drive. I was able to add a 1 TB SATA SSD.

As I mentioned above, the system came with Linux Mint on the hard drive. On the SDD I added Debian 12 and Ubuntu 25.04. The Ubuntu installation gave me a little troulble. It failed with a mystery error on my first try. I had been using a boot USB stick created with Balena Etcher. So I downloaded the ISO again and flashed it to a USB stick using Rufus. The installation with this drive worked perfectly.

I usually install the LTS releases of Ubuntu. However I have other systems running 24.04, so I decided to try the newer version this time. I suppose I will replace it with 25.10 this fall and 26.04 the following spring. That will get me back to an LTS version.

In case you are wondering, there was no data loss. Everything was backed up on external drives and cloud storage.