Microsoft support for Window 10 ended on October 14, except for those who are willing to jump through some additional hoops, which I am not. I found relatively cheap Windows 11 systems to replace the Windows 10 boxes my wife and oldest son had been using. My own two Windows 10 systems also had Ubuntu and Debian Linux installed, so I deleted Windows 10 from them. They are perfectly useable with Linux. I am writing this on one of them now.
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.
I recycled an old HP Laptop and replaced it with a Dell Latitude 7310, purchased from Repowered. 16GB RAM (can be upgraded to 32GB), 512GB NVMe drive, Windows 11 Pro. I configured Windows to my needs. Next, install Linux (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
A couple weeks ago I saw this DEC VT102 from about 1980 at Free Geek Twin Cities. It brought back memories.
I am continuing to work on my new (for me) Dell Inspiron 3670. I have now upgraded the RAM to 32 GB, replacing the 2 8 GB DIMMs with 2 new 16 GB DIMMs. I ordered the memory from Crucial, which has an “Upgrade my computer” button on its home page. With this you can look up exactly what DRAM and SSD upgrades are apppropriate for your particular system. Physically installing the new DIMMs was a little tricky simply because of where the memory slots are placed on the motherboard, but I managed. Since I am now at the maximum possible memory I will not have to do this again, unless one of DIMMs fails.
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.
I discovered the C drive on my main Windows 10 system was almost full. I was not expecting this, since I use Linux most of the time. A lot of the trouble was a file in the root called hiberfil.sys, taking up 13GB. This is used if you want to hibernate your Windows system, and needs at least 40% of your RAM. I never use hibernation, I simply disabled it in an administrator command window with
powercfg -h off
and the file disappeared, as described in How to Disable Hibernation on Windows 10. I also moved a few large iso files to other locations and now have a comfortable amount of free space on the drive.
I have used Boot-Repair-Disk a lot. It has saved my computer systems many times, since I do a lot of experimenting on them. The title program, boot-repair, can often fix the boot procedure on Linux systems if that has been messed up. This happens to me more than it should since my computers typically can boot Windows and one or more flavors of Linux. Altering one OS sometimes causes one of the others to be unbootable.
Other programs on the disk are also useful. For example, OS-Uninstaller does exactly what the name suggests. GParted lets you add, move, delete, and resize disk partitions, which I often need to do in preparation for adding a new OS (You need to be careful with this, especially for bootable partitions). The whole disk is actually a standalone Linux system, so with its Linux terminal you can access and work with any of the drives on your system.
I had a Debian 11 system on an HP desktop. I followed How to Upgrade to Debian 12 from Debian 11 to upgrade it. This worked well, though there were a few glitches.
I read WordTsar Is Reviving the ’80s WordPerfect Writing Experience with considerable interest, but following it up with a look at WordTsar and WordTsar: Wordstar for the 21st Century quickly showed that the first author was not present during the word processor wars of the 1980s. WordStar lost to WordPerfect in that conflict, but still has some diehard fans, the most famous being George R.R. Martin, who still uses it on a DOS machiue. I have been able to run WordStar on FreeDOS, with FreeDOS running on a virtual machine. This was WordStar 4.0, which is now “abandonware,” i.e. free, but without any official support.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 