All the talk about the end of support for Windows 10 has got me looking at new PCs. My current PC is a Dell XPS 8900, bought from Costco in 2016.
I ruminated about this in a blog post from about a month ago, and I still haven’t quite decided what to do.
Part of me really doesn’t want to give up on my ten-year-old Dell. It still works! I replaced the hard drive with an SSD quite some time ago, so that’s not an issue. It’s got a CD/DVD drive, which I like. And I have no particular problems with Windows 10 that would be solved by upgrading to Windows 11.
I’ve gone back and forth with a lot of ideas:
- Simple: replace my Windows 10 tower PC with a new Windows 11 tower PC.
- Complex (and probably a bad idea): Keep using my current PC, but wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu on it. Move away from Windows, and become a “Linux person”.
- Kicking the can down the road: Keep using my current PC, and keep using Windows 10. Pay for security updates from either MS or a third party.
- Get a Mac Mini, and gradually transition to using that as my primary desktop PC. Eventually, wipe and recycle the Dell.
- Get a new mini PC, running Windows 11. Move my stuff over to that. Wipe and recycle the Dell. Remain a “Windows person” but stop being a “tower PC” person.
So it’s that mini PC track I’ve been on this weekend. I’ve learned a few things. First: new PCs, even mini PCs, are often very expensive these days. I’m looking at stuff from Dell and HP, and it’s $2000 or $3000, if I want 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. I don’t know if that’s tariffs or what.
So I’m looking at refurbished stuff. There seems to be a pretty big ecosystem around selling and buying refurbished Mini PCs. I guess they’re mostly units that were used by large companies, and were dumped at end of lease. And it seems like a lot of the ones being sold on Amazon and eBay are not just refurbished, but have also had the original parts (SSD and RAM) replaced. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that looks pretty good, on paper, but might be a little iffy, and it’s hard to compare one guy’s mini PC to another guy’s, even if they appear to be the same model. I guess I should just “spin the wheel” and pick one. For my purposes, anything with enough RAM and a 1 TB SSD should be fine.
Since my current PC and monitor are so old, I’m thinking a bit about the extra complications I’m going to have when I switch to a new PC.
- My monitor has one DVI port and one old analog VGA port. Any new PC is going to have either DisplayPort or HDMI out, so I’m going to need a DP/HDMI to DVI cable.
- These mini PCs generally only have headphone ports for audio output. Audio is yet another rabbit hole here. I think the default setup now is to route the audio through the HDMI output, with the video, then have a soundbar under your monitor. But of course that won’t work for me. I may need to buy USB speakers.
- If I want to keep using a CD/DVD drive, I’m going to need to buy an external USB one.
- I actually have two 1 TB drives in my current PC: the SSD that I use as the main boot drive, and the original hard drive, which I now use for File History backups. I also have a 2 TB external USB drive that I use for backups (via Bvckup Pro). I’ll keep using the 2TB external, but I’ll need to think about whether or not I want to set up a second external drive for the File History backups.
- And, if I’m going to keep both PCs going for awhile, I might want to get a KVM, so I can switch between them. The “M” part of that gets a little complicated. Do I want to get a DVI KVM? Am I going to keep the old DVI monitor for long, or should I punt and just get a new HDMI monitor?
As usual, I’m really spinning my wheels on all this stuff. I’m also starting to consider that maybe my end-state will be a mini PC running Windows 11, and a Mac Mini, stacked on top of each other, both connected to a KVM.