… woke up to find my PC strangely silent… It refused to boot and so it was open-the-case time… It did initially get power, CPU fan spinning, but that soon cut out, and no attempt to access the drives. After a bit of fiddling I got the CPU fan to keep running, but nothing loading from boot disk. In summary, I suspect it was failed power unit and it was finally time to buy a new PC after over 10 years…
Luckily, I do have an old Microsoft Surface that I could use to search on (though the touch-screen is broken and I have to use mouse and virtual keyboard). I did look at Arbico (the supplier of the last PC) but nothing I fancied there now. Surprisingly quickly, I settled on a local (Dronfield) firm (DIrectcomputers) as they had what looks like a decent machine for around £1000. Did have to add a couple of extras (2TB HDD and up memory from 16GB to 32GB). Hardware has much changed since 2014, though, and the graphics card they supply supports just HDMI and Displayport – whereas I’ve been using DVI and VGA… They kindly offered to throw in a couple of adapter cables for free…
It took just over a couple of weeks for the PC to arrive, but it’s a funky-looking unit: white case, glass door to access the innards, and multiple glowing lights… Everything came up fine; all peripherals working except the Wacom tablet which needed a driver download. Of course, the biggest task has been restoring everything from Pcloud backup, and configuring a million things to get Windows to be the way I want it to be. So many oddities with Windows, though… it did look a lot different from the WIndows 10 I’ve been used to, but I just assumed it was because I’d ordered it with WIndows 10 Pro.
Anyway, after 3 days of hard slog, I’ve got it into an acceptable state so I’ll ease off for a bit. And yesterday I actually bothered to check the Windows spec – and discovered it’s shipped with Windows 11 Pro, not 10! Aargh! I definitely ordered 10! Too late now; I’ll just have to suck it up. Does explain why it all looked so strange, though! I’ve settled on Firefox as main browser (mainly because Google looks like it’s going to forcefully stop the Ublockorigin extension from blocking ads on Youtube, so that will stop any Chromium-base browser running the extension successfully – Firefox is not Chromium). And Thorium was going to be my secondary browser, but, just this morning, I came across an article about the Mullvad browser (never heard of it before, but it’s from the Tor people, apparently) so I’m giving that a go.