Windows 10 bricks

Thanks for this, it gave me a reminder to enrol for the ESU.

In case someone doesn't know: the link is on the Update and Security page (which is under Windows Settings)

The problem with the "Old" hardware designation, is this will be going out of support at some point... and then what ? It's the same issue for LinuxMint 21.3, which is kernel 5.15 as well. LinuxMint 22.2 uses 6.14 kernel.

That's why any sort of remediation to keep an OS running, is short-lived.

The 9-year old W10 hardware, it might be more than nine years old. Check the site:intel.com for the processor name and see what the date of release is.

This is my CPU google( site:intel.com 4930K )

Launch Date Q3'13

but the motherboard was purchased in 2015, about two years after CPU release.

I had LM222 running on that, last week. Don't know why it works.

Paul

It's weird the way the Ubuntu 24.04 install didn't work on that PC. It was perfectly fine in the trial mode, where it doesn't change anything on the disk and runs from the install USB stick, it did everything, accessed the hard disk, worked the network and wi-fi.

When I asked it to install, it went through all of the menus and got to the point where it was meant to start overwriting the hard disk. It said it was doing it. The install USB stick flashed as if it was being read. It did that for hours and hours. Then I gave up, pressed the reset switch, and it booted into windows. The hard disk was untouched!

From the 22.04 install disk it all went straight through with no problems.

nib

Video cards do eventually matter. The Optiplex 780 would not upgrade to Win10 22H2, until I changed the video card to HD6450 (instead of GMA graphics). The HD6450 had only one ("experimental") WDDM driver, which is why that was sufficient to allow Win10 22H2 to Upgrade onto the machine.

Some Linux cling to older stuff. Devuan still uses X11, but installing it will cause hair loss. The installer needs work (the netinstaller does not tell you what partition setup to use).

IDK, I guess they just do everything a bit differently.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu but has extras with Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice part of the installation. It comes with a choice of Cinnamon, Mate or XFC as the screen presentation, and having tried both Cinnamon and Mate I have opted for Mate.

It also behaved weirdly installing it on a HP ProDesk which I bought second hand without a disc. I installed a 3gb disc I had been using for my music library until I moved the library to a NAS so that I could access it from laptop as well as desktop, so I knew it was a working disc. Then I had a Live LM21.3 DVD which ran OK from the DVD so I tried installing from that and it got as far as copying files for the live system then crashed over half way through. I then downloaded LM22.1 from

Part of the benefit of LM over Ubuntu is that it recognises more printers. If the OP installs LM (use "Wipe disc and install" if there are options) he might find that it will recognise his printer. If he downloads iscan-bundle-2.30.4.x64.deb.tar.gz and instals it, it should work his Epsom Scanner - it works mine, and mine is ancient, first bought with Win98 and usable until I replaced XP with Win7 and too good to throw away (it can scan photos on transparencies and from negatives as well as anything on paper) so I kept it until I heard of the Linux application when it became usable again.

I have also found the LM forum useful:

I too ended up with MATE because is a bit more flexible (tho less pretty) than Cinnamon.

It's very much a Win XP lookalike. I configured mine to look a bit OS/X though.

I couldn't say about the printers.

The inclusions of standard email, browser and office software as standard is good, and the 'driver' manager which scans the hardware and tells you what 'better than open source' software drivers you probably need is handy.