The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-05, 03:00:

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-10-05, 01:59:

Dell Precision 3630 with an i7-8700k or i7-9700 or higher.

Do you really call going from 6th to 8/9th gen a worth upgrade?

At the time that the 8th gen came out, it wasn’t a very interesting upgrade, but then the spectre and meltdown mitigation came out and made upgrading to a gen8 cpu more compelling because there was hardware mitigation and less performance hit. Gen 9 arrived with a full hardware mitigation.

Does windows 11 include the spectre and meltdown mitigation if you force an install on a < gen 8 cpu? I’m pretty sure Windows 11 has the unavoidable performance hit of the software mitigation if you run windows 11 on gen7 and earlier.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-05, 08:48:

Using efficiently what you have if part of the fun, at least for anyone who prefers to like keeping the neurons spinning more th […]
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Using efficiently what you have if part of the fun, at least for anyone who prefers to like keeping the neurons spinning more than burning money "just because".

if you are doing anything other than just very basic things.

My current best laptop is still only 9th gen, but I do have some newer ones with smaller screens and lesser video cards.

Anything past Sandy bridge is more than enough to do most of a normal user, and most power users need.

Isn't that the point, the point is that from gen 6 to gen 8 or 9 there isn't a worth jump in performance.

Gen 6/7/8/9 are all worth upgrades, but if you're coming from something much slower, like core duos

Complete agreement. My 8th gen i5 has only 8 gb and even with a 3gb RAMDRIVE the system is very fast. Don't see how 32 gb would benefit anyone except when having dozens of windows open at the same time, video encoding / massive photo manipulation or running a local LLM. Sandy Bridge or above is still very usable on modern OS. The key is to have a fast SSD as your primary partition (TLC or higher, not QLC garbage) and to prune as much of the bullshit and bloat out of the OS as possible.

You have to have common sense, and apply it well (viz, remove the BS and bloat) in order to properly run Win 10/11 on ANY system no matter how recent.

douglar wrote:

Does windows 11 include the spectre and meltdown mitigation if you force an install on a < gen 8 cpu? I’m pretty sure Windows 11 has the unavoidable performance hit of the software mitigation if you run windows 11 on gen7 and earlier.

Yes, Win11 includes the microcode and OS mitigations on older CPUs just like Win10, but Spectre/Meltdown isn't the primary reason for the 8th gen cutoff.

The real hardware line is MBEC or Mode Based Execution Control. Win11 turns on VBS or Virtualization Based Security and Memory Integrity by default.
8th gen runs it in hardware with zero overhead, while 6th/7th gen has to emulate it in software causing a noticeable performance hit unless you manually disable Memory Integrity.
Thats one of the reasons I like Win11 IoT. It skips all those checks and just tests hardware requirements. If the hardware supports it it turns it on if it doesnt it doesnt because it seeks maximum compatibility.
Given whats going on in security now I dont run Win11 on anything less than 8th gen CPUs unless its Win11 Enterprise IoT.
I was running Win11 on a i7- 6700 but I swapped it out for Zorin OS on one and Mint on the other. Not that theyre not powerful enough to run Win11 though.

Aside from security architecture, moving up to 8th/9th Gen is a major jump simply due to core counts. That era "coincided" with AMDs first Ryzen release, forcing Intel to finally abandon their quad core plateau.

6th/7th Gen i7s were stuck at 4C/8T, whereas an i7-8700 is 6C/12T and an i7-9700 is 8 physical cores. For a Win11 daily driver, those extra physical cores make a massive difference in preventing modern OS background clutter from hitching your active tasks.

If we are talking about i7s
6th gen is powerful enough to handle most modern PC tasks, like office documents. browsing web pages (half dozen at a time)... Things of this nature.
Yes you can, and until recently I was using a 4th gen Xeon system (HP Z230) to broswse the web but its seen its best days a long time since.

7th gen is just a step up from Skylake... it added Optane support, but not very well.
Its a good workhorse CPU.

8th gen is where Intel started to get interesting and 9th got spicy because they had AMD rockin up to the party with CPUs that mattered.

As to answering the OP.
HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini (about £150)
It goes up to an i7-8700, upto 64Gb RAM, dual M.2 SSD with the option for a 2.5" SSD or HDD.
You can get an RX560 4Gb dGPU (which is what I have but with an i7-8700T 35w TDP CPU as the RX560 is only supported in the 35w version.

https://youtu.be/QdEf-dXl-_Y

Thats as low as I would go if genuine Win11 support is a requirement... 8th gen Coffee Lake.
Anything G4 Mini or newer will fit the bill as the cost matters.
Then there is the G5 which is 9th gen Coffee Lake Refresh, and then G6 Mini is 10th gen Comet Lake.
G7 Mini is very hard to find as this is the covid era and companies didnt upgrade from the G6.
G8 Mini Ive never seen, that would have been 11th gen Rocket Lake.
G9 Mini is 12th gen Alder Lake but now you are getting into £350+ for a PC but the power is pokey.
I have a G9 Mini which is 13th gen Raptor Lake but thats an HP IP Conference PC which might be why you can get 13th gen in a G9, Im not sure.

Over the years ServeTheHome STH did some half way decent videos covering the HP Mini PCs on the YT channel, but he gushes a lot and its clearly a channel made to harvest hardware paid for by the channel... So take what he says with in pinch of salt.

Coffee lake 8700 + RX560 4Gb = World of Tanks HD gaming.

douglar wrote on Today, 02:37:

At the time that the 8th gen came out, it wasn’t a very interesting upgrade, but then the spectre and meltdown mitigation came out and made upgrading to a gen8 cpu more compelling because there was hardware mitigation and less performance hit. Gen 9 arrived with a full hardware mitigation.

Does windows 11 include the spectre and meltdown mitigation if you force an install on a < gen 8 cpu? I’m pretty sure Windows 11 has the unavoidable performance hit of the software mitigation if you run windows 11 on gen7 and earlier.

Any sane minded normal user should disable the mitigations as the first thing to do in both Linux using the mitigations=off boot parameter and the mitigation powershell scripts in in Windows.

And possibly using an older, pre spectre bios, if not really needed for other reasons.

Then if you are the paypal's IT guy, it's different, but be sure that paypal isn't dealing with ivy bridge machines...

That said while it's true that that the newer the OS is, the less effective the disable mitigations scripts are, it's also true that over time the mitigations became more and more better optimized, and their impact is not really noticeable in most normal scenarios

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 05:02:

Given whats going on in security now I dont run Win11 on anything less than 8th gen CPUs unless its Win11 Enterprise IoT.

Or Server 2025 , no stupid setup.exe checks, no bloatware, defender can be uninstalled from the GUI and so on.

Server "2024" (build 25398.xxx) and same builds of W11 IoT/LTSC are even better an the last that can run on core2s Athlon 64/Turionss, but build 25398 doesn't exist "in nature" and you have to make them yourself.

The real hardware line is MBEC or Mode Based Execution Control. Win11 turns on VBS or Virtualization Based Security and Memory Integrity by default.
8th gen runs it in hardware with zero overhead, while 6th/7th gen has to emulate it in software causing a noticeable performance hit unless you manually disable Memory Integrity.

Always use an MBR partitioned HDD, which is the best way to avoid VBS. Even on ugly modern machines w/o CSM support, just use a MBR vhdx instead of an GPT vhdx and you're fine.

The Solutor wrote:

Always use an MBR partitioned HDD, which is the best way to avoid VBS. Even on ugly modern machines w/o CSM support, just use a MBR vhdx instead of an GPT vhdx and you're fine.

Relying on MBR partitioning just to trick the hypervisor into not loading VBS comes with a massive downside on a daily driver. The 2Tb partition ceiling.

If you are running large SATA (M.2 or 2.5") or NVMe M.2 drives or high capacity HDDs for games and backups (many of my gamer friends actually do this), forcing MBR means either throwing away usable space or chopping drives up into messy workarounds. Dont forget it was only a few months ago 2, 3, 4Tb SSDs were affordable. Bypassing VBS by toggling Memory Integrity off in Windows Security or using IoT LTSC gets you the exact same bare metal performance while still keeping native GPT and UEFI. Which is an advantage for many people on modern machine.
All youre doing is swapping one work around for another of your own making.

As for Spectre/Meltdown, it isn't just about targeted server attacks against PayPal. Speculative execution side channels can execute through untrusted JavaScript delivered via standard web ads (one of the reasons I block the bloody things in a sinkhole). You don't even have to visit a shady site just hitting a mainstream site serving compromised ad network scripts can trigger it.
This is why I use a VPN on my smart phone, I tunnel into my home network and pick up its services protections, so while everybody is enjoying using work wifi to surf I am too but behind a curtain of protection against an enemy they dont even know exists.

Given that modern mitigations are well optimized to the point where general daily overhead is barely noticeable anyway, intentionally breaking drive partitioning schemes and stripping baseline browser isolation isn't worth the trouble on an internet connected PC.

You have come up with a work around yes, but it doesnt cover any ground and its a lot of walking along the way!

I cant say youre wrong, its just there are other ways too and some of the easier as you wont even know the cloak of protection is there.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 05:02:

Yes, Win11 includes the microcode and OS mitigations on older CPUs just like Win10, but Spectre/Meltdown isn't the primary reaso […]
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douglar wrote:

Does windows 11 include the spectre and meltdown mitigation if you force an install on a < gen 8 cpu? I’m pretty sure Windows 11 has the unavoidable performance hit of the software mitigation if you run windows 11 on gen7 and earlier.

Yes, Win11 includes the microcode and OS mitigations on older CPUs just like Win10, but Spectre/Meltdown isn't the primary reason for the 8th gen cutoff.

The real hardware line is MBEC or Mode Based Execution Control. Win11 turns on VBS or Virtualization Based Security and Memory Integrity by default.
8th gen runs it in hardware with zero overhead, while 6th/7th gen has to emulate it in software causing a noticeable performance hit unless you manually disable Memory Integrity.
Thats one of the reasons I like Win11 IoT. It skips all those checks and just tests hardware requirements. If the hardware supports it it turns it on if it doesnt it doesnt because it seeks maximum compatibility.
Given whats going on in security now I dont run Win11 on anything less than 8th gen CPUs unless its Win11 Enterprise IoT.
I was running Win11 on a i7- 6700 but I swapped it out for Zorin OS on one and Mint on the other. Not that theyre not powerful enough to run Win11 though.

Aside from security architecture, moving up to 8th/9th Gen is a major jump simply due to core counts. That era "coincided" with AMDs first Ryzen release, forcing Intel to finally abandon their quad core plateau.

6th/7th Gen i7s were stuck at 4C/8T, whereas an i7-8700 is 6C/12T and an i7-9700 is 8 physical cores. For a Win11 daily driver, those extra physical cores make a massive difference in preventing modern OS background clutter from hitching your active tasks.

If we are talking about i7s
6th gen is powerful enough to handle most modern PC tasks, like office documents. browsing web pages (half dozen at a time)... Things of this nature.
Yes you can, and until recently I was using a 4th gen Xeon system (HP Z230) to broswse the web but its seen its best days a long time since.

7th gen is just a step up from Skylake... it added Optane support, but not very well.
Its a good workhorse CPU.

8th gen is where Intel started to get interesting and 9th got spicy because they had AMD rockin up to the party with CPUs that mattered.

Thanks for laying that out. It all makes sense.

I recently upgraded my mother-in-law from a 4790s / 8GB / GF1030 / Sata SSD to an 8700 / 16GB / GF1060 / M2 Sata SSD that I salvaged from the trash. Free is certainly fits in most people's budget.

The video card was 1) a nice find and 2) grandkids like roblox & mine craft so why not leave it in, even though the fan noise is borderline noticable.

Getting the secure boot was painful on the HP Firmware. Took me about an hour to figure out how to get Windows 10 to boot in legacy mode and then another to get it reenabled so that I could upgrade do windows 11. I had to switch to GPT, got odd errors from the MBR2GPT tool, had to follow a certain sequence to make things work.

The i7- 8700 w/ 16GB is more responsive than the i7-4790s w/ 8GB for my mother in-law's work load, which is an Ebay store and Microsoft Card games. (hint: it was the video advertisements that were the source of painful)

After getting it upgraded and getting windows reactivated, I made the questionable decision to update the HP Firmware. I had to switch it back to legacy mode to get it to boot and my first two attempts to get it back to secure boot didn't work.

Maybe I'll try again to get it enabled over the holidays.

I also recently upgraded my wife's PC from a home brew i3-6100 / 8GB / 1 TB NVME to a used HP M01-F3214 Ryzen 5300g / 8GB . I paid $162 for the PC including tax and shipping, but added the WD Black 2 TB NVME ($300 new ) and 8 GB DDR 4 ($28 used)

Main motivation is that the old NVME was getting full and getting old and 8GB isn't what it used to be on Windows..

This firmware didn't give me headaches like the i7-8700 envy did. Upgrade was pretty smooth, but even with the Vega 8 integrated GPU, my kids prefer to stream from their PC's instead of using the integrated graphics on her computer when they sit there.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 13:40:

Relying on MBR partitioning just to trick the hypervisor into not loading VBS comes with a massive downside on a daily driver. The 2Tb partition ceiling.

All my x64 OSes fits in less than 10GB vhd[x] (6/7GB for x86), then put them on a UEFI partition of the size you prefer, it's an non existent problem.

Easy to manage, copy, backup, replace, transfer over the LAN, and manageable size to transfer over the Internet as well.

For Linux installs it's the same, but not as monkey proof as the marvels that are the native vhds, for Vista and earlier MS OSes, again it's the same, but you need grub4dos and some more work during the setup.

About spectre/meltdown treats, I have yet to see a news about a real world application of such vulnerabilities, the matter as usual helped more intel and AMD to sell new HW, and MS to push Win11, than anything else.

douglar wrote on Today, 13:56:

Thanks for laying that out. It all makes sense. […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 05:02:

Yes, Win11 includes the microcode and OS mitigations on older CPUs just like Win10, but Spectre/Meltdown isn't the primary reaso […]
Show full quote

douglar wrote:

Does windows 11 include the spectre and meltdown mitigation if you force an install on a < gen 8 cpu? I’m pretty sure Windows 11 has the unavoidable performance hit of the software mitigation if you run windows 11 on gen7 and earlier.

Yes, Win11 includes the microcode and OS mitigations on older CPUs just like Win10, but Spectre/Meltdown isn't the primary reason for the 8th gen cutoff.

The real hardware line is MBEC or Mode Based Execution Control. Win11 turns on VBS or Virtualization Based Security and Memory Integrity by default.
8th gen runs it in hardware with zero overhead, while 6th/7th gen has to emulate it in software causing a noticeable performance hit unless you manually disable Memory Integrity.
Thats one of the reasons I like Win11 IoT. It skips all those checks and just tests hardware requirements. If the hardware supports it it turns it on if it doesnt it doesnt because it seeks maximum compatibility.
Given whats going on in security now I dont run Win11 on anything less than 8th gen CPUs unless its Win11 Enterprise IoT.
I was running Win11 on a i7- 6700 but I swapped it out for Zorin OS on one and Mint on the other. Not that theyre not powerful enough to run Win11 though.

Aside from security architecture, moving up to 8th/9th Gen is a major jump simply due to core counts. That era "coincided" with AMDs first Ryzen release, forcing Intel to finally abandon their quad core plateau.

6th/7th Gen i7s were stuck at 4C/8T, whereas an i7-8700 is 6C/12T and an i7-9700 is 8 physical cores. For a Win11 daily driver, those extra physical cores make a massive difference in preventing modern OS background clutter from hitching your active tasks.

If we are talking about i7s
6th gen is powerful enough to handle most modern PC tasks, like office documents. browsing web pages (half dozen at a time)... Things of this nature.
Yes you can, and until recently I was using a 4th gen Xeon system (HP Z230) to broswse the web but its seen its best days a long time since.

7th gen is just a step up from Skylake... it added Optane support, but not very well.
Its a good workhorse CPU.

8th gen is where Intel started to get interesting and 9th got spicy because they had AMD rockin up to the party with CPUs that mattered.

Thanks for laying that out. It all makes sense.

I recently upgraded my mother-in-law from a 4790s / 8GB / GF1030 / Sata SSD to an 8700 / 16GB / GF1060 / M2 Sata SSD that I salvaged from the trash. Free is certainly fits in most people's budget.

The video card was 1) a nice find and 2) grandkids like roblox & mine craft so why not leave it in, even though the fan noise is borderline noticable.

Getting the secure boot was painful on the HP Firmware. Took me about an hour to figure out how to get Windows 10 to boot in legacy mode and then another to get it reenabled so that I could upgrade do windows 11. I had to switch to GPT, got odd errors from the MBR2GPT tool, had to follow a certain sequence to make things work.

The i7- 8700 w/ 16GB is more responsive than the i7-4790s w/ 8GB for my mother in-law's work load, which is an Ebay store and Microsoft Card games. (hint: it was the video advertisements that were the source of painful)

After getting it upgraded and getting windows reactivated, I made the questionable decision to update the HP Firmware. I had to switch it back to legacy mode to get it to boot and my first two attempts to get it back to secure boot didn't work.

Maybe I'll try again to get it enabled over the holidays.

I also recently upgraded my wife's PC from a home brew i3-6100 / 8GB / 1 TB NVME to a used HP M01-F3214 Ryzen 5300g / 8GB . I paid $162 for the PC including tax and shipping, but added the WD Black 2 TB NVME ($300 new ) and 8 GB DDR 4 ($28 used)

Main motivation is that the old NVME was getting full and getting old and 8GB isn't what it used to be on Windows..

This firmware didn't give me headaches like the i7-8700 envy did. Upgrade was pretty smooth, but even with the Vega 8 integrated GPU, my kids prefer to stream from their PC's instead of using the integrated graphics on her computer when they sit there.

You took the hardest possible route through a maze of spikes that didn't need to be navigated at all!

My hat is off to you for wrestling it into submission, but all that grief came from trying to migrate an ancient legacy MBR install onto more modern UEFI hardware instead of starting fresh. When you updated the BIOS, it simply wiped your custom NVRAM settings and reinstated the factory Secure Boot defaults, which broke the converted boot path all over again.

Is there anything on that PC that can't just be backed up to an external drive or USB stick?

My advice is to back up her personal files and do a clean install
Get a USB stick and make standard Win11 install media with the Media Creation Tool or Rufus. If the stick is large enough you can use the free space to back up some files onto.
Boot into the BIOS, set it to pure UEFI mode with Secure Boot enabled no legacy/CSM nonsense, you dont want that on a nice Coffee lake CPU anyway, its a lovely compatible bit of kit, use it...
Boot the installer (F9 on a HP PC brings up the boot menu), wipe all the existing partitions on the drive down to unallocated space, and let Windows partition it as native GPT from scratch.

You won't run into a single legacy boot error or partition conflict apart from the Pascal card problems with Displayport and UEFI that causes black screen on boot when Secure boot in enabled. Thers a nvidia firmware update tool for DP 1.3. Patch the card and you should be ready to rock.

A friend of mine had the exact same problem a few years ago. He wanted to take his old drive to his new i7-8700k system...
Secure boot came down in the same way and he was running legacy for ages until I supplied a external drive he could back up to... family photos etc saved but old game files too. Most of which he didnt play anymore anyway. But then he bought a 2Tb NVMe SSD off amazon for less than £100 and I just installed Win11 onto it using an OEM act key and he never looked back.
OEM act dies with that PC but it was like £15 or something.
You should have seen his face when he reaslised how many hundreds Windows costs! 😀

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:06:

My advice is to back up her personal files and do a clean install

That's always a good thing to do. I did try that at once point with an NVME. I was having trouble getting the clean Win 11 install to recognize an NVME, but that could have also been a secure boot issue.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:06:

You should have seen his face when he reaslised how many hundreds Windows costs! 😀

Full retail is quite expensive, yes. There are some websites that sell bulk Windows 11 licenses on the cheap. I understand that not everyone would want to try those CD Key websites though.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:06:

My advice is to back up her personal files and do a clean install

Thanks god doctors, don't follow your suggestion.

If your son get sick, killing him and make a new baby surely works, but...

douglar wrote on Today, 18:23:

That's always a good thing to do. I did try that at once point with an NVME. I was having trouble getting the clean Win 11 ins […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:06:

My advice is to back up her personal files and do a clean install

That's always a good thing to do. I did try that at once point with an NVME. I was having trouble getting the clean Win 11 install to recognize an NVME, but that could have also been a secure boot issue.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:06:

You should have seen his face when he reaslised how many hundreds Windows costs! 😀

Full retail is quite expensive, yes. There are some websites that sell bulk Windows 11 licenses on the cheap. I understand that not everyone would want to try those CD Key websites though.

Nothing to do with secure boot, its more likely, given the machine being a HP and coffee lake capable, to be the IRST driver set to an incompatible mode such as Optane rather than AHCI.

Yeah I get the point of those CD key sites. Most of them I wouldnt even visit, but it was a recommendation from a much trusted YT channel.
Having Paypal as a payment option helps.

The Solutor wrote on Today, 18:55:

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:06:

My advice is to back up her personal files and do a clean install

Thanks god doctors, don't follow your suggestion.

If your son get sick, killing him and make a new baby surely works, but...

But what?

Dropping MBR on a system that supports GPT isnt even in the same conceptual universe as your parallel.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 20:26:

But what?

In two words?

Format/wiping is for loosers

People who still lives in the days of win9x

Dropping MBR on a system that supports GPT isnt even in the same conceptual universe as your parallel.

Yeah, yeah, follow blindly what mom MS tells you is better for your life.

But avoid to learn how deploy an image,instead of using setup.exe, to use dism, never learn what a native vhd is and what revolution it represents, never learn what a LZX compressed disk is, never learn to import PROPERLY a user profile from an old installation in a new one.

MS developed, unnoticed by people like you, some of the best innovations seen in any OS, but you limit yourself to stick with the worst things they produced: UEFI crap, VBS, useless mitigations and alike.

For sure your universe is parallel with mine, it's just I'm on the right side of the fence...

The Solutor wrote on Today, 21:07:

In two words? […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 20:26:

But what?

In two words?

Format/wiping is for loosers

People who still lives in the days of win9x

Dropping MBR on a system that supports GPT isnt even in the same conceptual universe as your parallel.

Yeah, yeah, follow blindly what mom MS tell you is better for you.

But avoid to learn how deploy an image, instead of using setup.exe, never learn what a native vhd is and what revolution it represent, never learn what a LZX compressed disk is, never learn to import PROPERLY a user profile from an old installation in a new one.

MS developed, unnoticed by people like you, some of the best innovations seen in any OS, but you limit to stick with the worst they produced UEFI crap, VBS, useless mitigations and alike.

For sure your universe is parallel with mine, it's just I'm on the right side of the fence...

Except the problems that he has had prove you wrong!

Its not like he is saving anything worth saving. He is moving from MBR to GPT on a system that is better suited to using GPT because its UEFI not BIOS.

First your post has overtones of elitest crap that is along the same lines as a Linux guru who thinks hes the goat because he knows all the linux commands. (mentioning VHD, LZX to make it look like you know what your talking about to make it work. dragging user profiles like that tells me you are not a sysadmin because otherwise you would know the problems you get because of it... What it also makes me think is you aint to familiar with modern hardware.)
There are ways to save it and make it work, but in this instance the juice isnt worth the squeeze. ESPECIALLY when you consider he could go up to a nice NVMe drive now that the 4th gen system didnt support for £25.
Even a basic ex enterprise used drive from a decommissioned corp PC would perform MUCH faster than the SATA SSD or HDD he carried over to the new system.

If he does where does your idea of make do and mend go?
You think he should still use MBR?

Your trying to use MBR so as not use the mitigation put in place to prove your point?

First rule of a sysadmin is never put a system into production that you know you will have to babysit.

third rule is keep it simple, stupid!

As to the rest of it none of it matters in this system.

Hanging onto MBR to not use the mitigations is a clutch response to somebody who doesnt have access to modern powerful hardware.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 21:20:

Except the problems that he has had prove you wrong!

Its not like he is saving anything worth saving. He is moving from MBR to GPT on a system that is better suited to using GPT because its UEFI not BIOS.

Define better suited.

And perhaps I suggested a painless way to use a UEFI partition, w/o having to renounce to the MBR simplicity.

Native vhds can be, obviously, either UEFI or MBR at your liking, it's just that UEFI solves a problem nobody has, a solution looking for problems

And even if vhds are too simply to use for your liking, you can use Clover to use GPT partitions on a 20 y/o system, just like you can use CSMWrap to install old and modern OSes even on UEFI class 3 systems that criminally come w/o CSM support

Also you can use a MBR formatted disk with a fake UEFI partition at the beginning, keeping that disk bootable no matter where you connect it, a universal disk w/o a single bit of third part SW

First your post has overtones of elitest crap

If knowledge, for you = elitism, I'm proud to be an elitist

There are ways to save it and make it work, but in this instance the juice isnt worth the squeeze. ESPECIALLY when you consider he could go up to a nice NVMe drive now that the 4th gen system didnt support for £25.

Where I talked about the specific case? I gave general suggestions, useful for everyone who read this thread, because you know what? For every thread with 4 writing users there are hundreds of subscribers and lurker that read.

Even a basic ex enterprise used drive from a decommissioned corp PC would perform MUCH faster than the SATA SSD or HDD he carried over to the new system.

Obviously SSD are faster than HDDs, but I'd like to find a single user able to spot the difference from a NVME and SATA SSD w/o restorting to a benchmark.

Perhaps again where I wrote something against NVMEs? Like a my famous compatriot used to say "I'm responsible of what I write, not of what you understand"

You think he should still use MBR?

Reverse the question, why use GPT if you're not forced to?

Your trying to use MBR so as not use the mitigation put in place to prove your point?

If MS publishes official scripts to do so and the Linux kernel developers put in place an option to do so, maybe it is for a reason, maybe for many reasons. As simple as that.

First rule of a sysadmin is never put a system into production that you know you will have to babysit.

Even this is debatable, making a system that you have to never maintain again = is the receipt to become unemployed.

Remember that, in the mind of a client, if a system requires no maintenance is because the OS is robust and the HW is reliable. No one think it's because the sysadmin did a good job

third rule is keep it simple, stupid!

You literally have no idea of what a native vhds is? Literally there isn't anything simpler of them.

A single file to backup a whole OS

Backup = copy one file from here to there using explorer or the command line, not a complicate and unreliable backup SW

A single partition on the physical disk, no matter if you use 2 or 27 OS in multiple boot.

The same os can be booted on baremetal, hyper V, VBox, KVM even vmware, under Window, Linux, *BSD, and other OSes

Migrate an OS between machines, is again matter of copying a single file using explorer and a single command to add it to the bootloader (or bootice if you prefer a gui app)

And I can continue for a day.

KISS is the king but you have to understand what it means before mentioning it in vain.

Going back to the OP, when my Windows 10 PC got flakey I ended up replacing it with a mini-PC (this was mid-2025, I got one with 64gm ram and Ryzen 7) plus an external drive device I could slot a bunch of hard drives into from my old system and fire up as needed.

I went for a mini PC because (a) space (b) I couldn't face building yet another new PC containing technology that I don't really care about, I just want it to work, (c) almost everything in my old system needed replacing, (d) my main PC I prefer to buy new parts for, so building afresh would be costly, (e) less hassle.

The mini-PC was surprisingly small, really easy to set up, gets the job done. My uses are mainly family/business-type stuff, games that are probably not very demanding , photo processing. A lot of the old hard drives were basically archives, didn't actually need to be in my main PC.

There are downsides to the mini-PC. Never enough USB ports - I need to buy a USB hub, probably a powered one if such things exist. And there are too many power supplies and cables trailing because the PC has an external brick, so does the external bay. Can use an eGPU but that another enclosure, more cables... so I haven't done that yet... and haven't needed it so far.

I have lost some licensed software but supposedly I could run my old Win10 install in a VM or some such if I really wanted to.