The industry that makes home computers needs to sell you new stuff for them to make money. The desktop computer that you have had for 10 years probably works just fine, but unless you buy a new one, these companies are not going to make a profit off you. There are a bunch of businesses in this value chain:
To give a little push to the wagon, Microsoft will make a new and slightly more shining of the Windows system every other year, but while this will remind the business community that they should replace the office computers while they are still good (and thereby provide a good flow of very cheap "old" computers for us home users, most of us just shrug instead of spending.
But they finally came up with a reason: The new version of Windows (Windows-11 25H2) will refuse to install on a machine that is more than 2 years old, so as they stop providing updates to Windows-10, many users feel forced to update.
An outfit (in Ireland, I think) provided a free program called Rufus to modify the install procedure to bypass this set of checks. So I set out to update the Windows machine on my desk at home.
This machine is about 11 years old, although I bought is used, just 3 years ago.
I found a 64GB USB 3.0 memory stick, downloaded the upgrade ISO file, downloaded the Rufus program and built the upgrade stick
I then went home and started the upgrade. It ran fine: After a couple of prompts so say "Agree" and "Continue", it hummed along for somewhere between an hour and two, and then ... got stuck during one of the periodic reboots.
When I gave up waiting and hit a manual reboot, it came up with a message that the upgrade had failed, and it would now roll the system back to the prior status. Which worked pretty nicely.
The error message gave a hexadecimal error code, that Google told me was some kind of driver problem.
I did some reading on some Internet Forum sites (superuser.com) and when I asked if this might be because my hard drive was set up with a Master Boot Record (MBR), someone said "Yes, of course - that would do it!" I think it is kind of bad that the upgrade procedure did not check for this at the outset!
So I confirmed that I did in fact have a MBR. I found out that Microsoft has a program that is already on my system called MBR2GPT that will convert that.
When you turn on your computer, it runs a couple of programs that are built into the mainboard, which tests a few things are OK, and then reads in the operating system from your hard drive. As part of this, it reads the *partition table* from the hard drive. This is like a table of contents, and there are two commonly used versions:
So I ran the MBR2GPT program, it fixed the partition table ... and then I hit the reset switch. The computer was stuck early in the boot sequence.
No problem: The first thing on the screen when hitting reset was a message flashing briefly at the top of the screen: F12 FOR BOOT OPTIONS. So I tried again and again while hitting F12, shift/F12, Alt/F12 and Ctrl/F12. All to no avail.
After some thinking, I looked at the back of the computer, and saw a purple connector jack for an old-style PS/2 keyboard. So I drove in to the office and retrieved a 20 year old keyboard with a PS/2 plug.
That did the trick: The BIOS could not see the USB keyboard. So with this, I could change the BIOS to look for a GPT disk.
Having successfully booted into Windows-10, I could now retry the upgrade. It spent a good half hour downloading updates to the system that were newer than my upgrade download, then asked me some questions to confirm that I was accepting the risks of upgrading an "unapproved" system.
This time I read it a bit more closely, than went and ran Microsoft's program to verify the qualifications of my system. And when I read the output from that, I found something that scared me into backing down from the upgrade!
Every year, Intel (and AMD) releases new versions of their CPU chips. They have about a dozen different marketing names for them: Atom, Celeron, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, , Core i7 Ultra, Xeon etc etc. For each of these, there is a new version every year. (And for each of those names, there may be multiple models). Now - in 2025 - the current set is called "Generation 14". And in most cases, there are a few tweaks to the instruction set. Most software developers shy away from making use of these minor improvements in order not to have an endless set of variations of the software optimized for each version of the CPUs. But over time, the improvements add up, and I suspect that it was the new emphasis on AI (Artificial Intelligence) that caused the decision to leave the older machines behind, requiring that the CPU must be at least "generation 8" to run the new OS version 25H2. When I looked up the CPU that was in my desktop, it was a "second generation" so it was definitely *a lot* older than the cutoff point. I briefly wondered if a newer CPU would fit on the same socket in the mainboard, but alas, no such luck.
So I found a refurbished system with a "generation 8" CPU, which should arrive in a week.
If there is a positive takeaway from this saga, it is that there will now be a large number of old, but still pretty good machines, that can now only run Linux, so they will become almost free for those willing to use them in that way. Linux is notoriously good about supporting old machines. While Fedora and Ubuntu went 64-bit-only several years ago, several other distributions still offer support for 32-bit Intel/AMD CPUs:
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