A lesson learnt the hard way

LitusSaxonicum · May 30, 2020

I had an old system, based on an Asus M4A88T-M motherboard and an AMD 965 Phenom II. This gave great service, and was progressively 'upgraded', twice to increase the RAM, once to install Windows 10 as the free upgrade from Windows 7, and then later a fresh install when I switched to using a SSD as the boot drive. Finally, I added a nice USB front panel driven by a PCIe USB3 card, bought from the internet rather cheaply.

All had been fine with Windows updates until it came to 1903. This wouldn't update because of what it called a 'driver error'.

I automatically assumed that the CPU or board was the problem, and built a new system. I transferred my stuff over, but the new system for some reason wouldn't take my e mail. So I just connected up the old one for e mail only, and put up with the 'Update-won't work-rollback' procedure. Until one day it wouldn't rollback. I think that it had to be a problem with the repeated overwriting of a particular location on the SSD, and there's no repair. But I did strip out the motherboard etc, cleaned it up and re-assembled it, just with the onboard video (the video card went into my new system and works there) and without the USB card. With a new SSD it works fine.

Lesson 1: cheap PCIe expansion cards won't necessarily have good drivers

Lesson 2: you can't allow MS Win updates to go on ad infinitum if you boot from a SSD because the update and rollback eventually won't work

Lesson 3: old hardware is still often as good as new, depending on what you want to use it for.

Lesson 3? Well of course. The old system boots faster than the new one. Single-threaded applications run at more or less the same speed and having 6 cores and 12 threads instead of 4 cores doesn't matter if you only use one of them..

Master Disaster · May 30, 2020

18 minutes ago, LitusSaxonicum said:

Lesson 3? Well of course. The old system boots faster than the new one. Single-threaded applications run at more or less the same speed and having 6 cores and 12 threads instead of 4 cores doesn't matter if you only use one of them.

Not true, modern CPUs have a MUCH higher IPC than that Phenom has.