So, my work machine was getting long in the tooth. Occasionally not booting and requiring me to jiggle memory sticks or tighten CPU cooler screws. It was a DDR3 machine with a Xeon E3 1230V2 with 8gb of RAM (and oddly enough an RTX 2060.) The fans were getting pretty loud, too.
I had a Ryzen 2600x and 16gb of DD4 from my home PC lying around, so I bought a cheap mainboard, tore the old one out of the case, attached all the hardware to the new mainboard - including the SSD with Mint installed - and BOOM! It booted first try without issue. Even going from Intel to AMD, DDR3 to DDR4. My mind is blown!
I can’t imagine how borked my machine would have been if I’d tried that with Windows.
Now, what do I do with a still-working Xeon and mainboard?!?
I have swapped Linux SSDs with Mint and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed between an AMD desktop PC, an Intel desktop and an Intel laptop and never had any problems. They just boot up and work. Even the NVIDIA card in one of the desktops didn’t cause any real problems.
If you tried this with Windows, the OS would break, even if it booted at all, and the software licenses would all become invalid even if you could fix it up technically. You’d spend days fixing driver problems and teaching it to find its own partitions. Linux is amazingly portable.
I know some of y’all like to bash Windows at every chance, but except for the activation it’s portable as well and the OS wouldn’t normally break. You can put your Windows SSD into other computers and it will boot just fine. This might have been different with Windows 7 and earlier versions, but as of Windows 8 it’s smooth sailing.
That’s good to know. I suppose most of us not knowing this is a good indicator of the average age around here. I think the last time I installed Windows from scratch was 7…
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You can boot windows from a USB stick if you really want. It’s even branded. “Windows to go”.
So I’m discovering! I might just have to install Linux on my home machine, but I’ve been running Windows for so long, I really worry I’m going to break something in that case. I also do a lot of audio production with that machine, and software compatibility might end up being a big problem.
Outside of maybe not having the chipset drivers on newer platforms you can easily move drives from an Intel or AMD system or vise versa. And ever since Windows 8 Windows update will grab basically every single driver automatically for you. Activation is hit or miss unless you have a key in the bios, then it automatically activates itself.