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Twelve years ago I posted about my new computer. That computer lasted twelve years. For a while, I was having difficulty getting it to turn on. Finally, I could not get it to turn on at all. I ordered a new one on July 15 and got it on July 19. Unlike the previous one, which was custom designed, this one was a refurbished Dell that cost me less than half as much.

Here's a screenshot I took soon after getting it:

And here is one I took today with Rainmeter and HWiNFO open.

I'll now compare the specs of the two computers. The new one has six cores instead of four, but each core is 3.2 GHz - 4.3 GHz instead of 3.6 - 3.8 GHz. The new CPU is Intel rather than AMD, and it supports Secure Boot. The new one has 32 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB, though the old one had each RAM card in its own heatsink sleeve, and the new one leaves the RAM bare. The old one had a more powerful PSU, a better heatsink, and a better ventilated case. While I got an adapter for connecting a SATA drive through a USB 3 port, the old one had an integrated external SATA port I could plug a drive into and boot from. Unfortunately, I have not gotten this new computer to boot from anything except its C: drive. Its drive is an NVME SSD, which is smaller and faster than any SSD drive I have had before, which helps speed up boot time, and it has more space than the one that originally came with my previous computer. The new one uses onboard graphics instead of a graphics card, though its graphics capacity is probably equivalent. Both have onboard audio instead of a soundcard.

The new one is Windows 11, because I wanted the OS on a new computer to be up-to-date and not lose support in the near future. However, Windows 11 was not a reason for upgrading, and it does not seem to have any advantages over Windows 10. It mainly differs in design from Windows 10, but as you can see from the screenshots, I have made it look more like earlier versions of Windows anyway. One of the disadvantages has been that one of my gamepads is not being recognized by the new computer. At least I've been able to dig out another gamepad that does work with it. Another disadvantage is how it is displaying the retro video game Warblade. My previous computer would stretch it out to fit the width of the monitor, but the new computer does not stretch it out and displays black on each side. This is more a matter of preference, though. Because I could not boot my previous computer's C drive, I could not retrieve the passwords I had stored in Vivaldi. At least most of my passwords were already in Firefox or Edge, which I could transfer, and I was able to change passwords I could not retrieve.

While there have been some slight problems with the new computer, I have not found it unable to run software I could run with Windows 10. In particular, Zillions-of-Games, Ultimate Paint, and Warblade, which are all old programs no longer being developed, are all working. I have not tried all the software I used in Windows 10, but the programs I regularly use are working fine, and programs that are still kept up-to-date should still work with it.