FreeTimeTech Shorts: Why I have a Second Desktop
A little while ago I was wondering around Value Village (A Chain of Canadian Thrift Stores) I found a desktop of a strange vintage it seemed like a really interesting level of hardware and it was only $15 and I thought what the Hay and decided to buy it and shockingly it was more of an asset than I could have imagined especially at the $15 Price tag, So this computer is Powered By an AMD Athlon 2 and a Very strange thing to see in this day an Asus Motherboard … With Nvidia integrated Graphics I thought it was too cool.. The desktop was in a fairly generic case from the Late Windows Vista and early Windows 7 era but this is actually a really cool thing because it doesn’t need to look too pretty the case slides open which makes it really idea for acronis true image drive cloning and to keep it on hand I threw a spare DVD drive in the machine to keep acronis in there speaking of the old case it was nice to not only have the 5.25” bays available to easily upgrade but also have a 2.5” bay that was nice to install a card reader. This was great to revisit.. Which actually leads me to why I wanted a desktop of this age, I recently acquired was because of the fact that I wanted to Install cydia on the device and while I tried multiple newer computers try as i may was unable to get the device ‘jailbroken’ however because a lot of this software is from the early 2010s runs just fine on Windows 7 and that is what was installed, however there is more to the story the computer was also dual booted with Windows XP so that if there are older tools games or features from past copies of Windows I am able to obtain that software and access it without affecting my main system now this isn’t a system to replace my desktop as for the most part my Main desktop is great and does everything I want its quite powerful being powered by an AMD R7 3700x Watercooled OC’D, 32GB Ram, 6TB Storage across HDD and SSD Storage and a 1660Ti so the question can be raised why not use virtualization and while I am a big supporter on VMWare and similar software its not exactly a perfect solution as one of the requirements is that I need it to be able to talk to actual hardware I originally wanted to use it as an to do a traditional review however, the desktop has become a permanent fixture and its now an essential part of my desk and I will keep it for a long time and my brief time with Windows 11 I found some of the software I used with Windows 10 didnt work on 11 so as time goes on I will be keeping spare desktops for as long as I require to use some older software
