When is something 'retro'? I'll define that as when you can't get a supported modern OS to run on it anymore. That means my Core2Quad Q8200 is retro as of now. My brother was complaining about his PC being awfully slow. That was a complete trainwreck - first off an old Core Duo T2300 with 2GB RAM then an ancient old 160GB OS drive showing SMART errors. But the clincher was the fans. They were all so clogged with a mix of cigarette tar, dust and cat hair that two out of four didn't turn at all, and one of the remaining two was so clogged it didn't do much. So that poor little CPU was overheating and thermally throttling. Cleaned it up a bit, but decided he needed some newer hardware and I had perfectly usable stuff surplus to requirement.
So dragged the system back home, thoroughly cleaned it (filthy :r ), replaced the old T2300 and interesting So479 motherboard with a Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L. It may be 12 years old, but with aforementioned Core2Quad and 4GB of RAM it should be more than capable of handling the occasional word processing and frequent Facebook trolling that my brother gets up to. Then inserted a trusty old Intel 120GB SSD, stuck in a freshly-made official Windows 10 boot USB and... no boot. Turns out UEFI support is compulsory now for the USB media. Shit. Then set about migrating the existing Windows 7 install to the SSD. Pain in the rear-end, but managed that. So tried to upgrade (still possible from Windows 7 to 10). After a lot of mess, complete fail - the infamous 0xc1900101-0x30017 error. Something went wrong before boot. After ruling out various other software things, what's left sounds like BIOS issues (possible lack of UEFI, GPT or secure boot) again. Yep, a C2Q system is now too old to be allowed to run Windows 10, so despite multiple cores and RAM support still outclassing low-end new stuff, it's officially retro in the nastiest way 🙁
Not quite giving up yet, most of the problems seem related to the 1803 build which gave me hell on my modern systems too. It seems possible to upgrade to Windows 10 without the updates if you disconnect the network at the right point in the process (after activation check, before updates). So reduced to repeatedly starting the process and pulling UTP out at various stages. Not my idea of a relaxing evening...