January 13th I learned Windows 10 was free as an upgrade from 7. I spent January 14th (the day windows 7 was no longer supported) backing everything up and slow formatting all the drives. January 15 I installed Windows 7 and upgraded it to 10. Yesterday I installed the same Windows 7 on another drive, cut access to the internet and installed Gimp and SketchUp-like software on it. I have access to everything I need, and Microsoft doesn’t.
The best part? It didn’t cost a dime. This would have been the first money spent on the computer in 9 years. I hope to get another 4 years out of it.
2010 was a great time to build a machine. There were new processors, SSDs just came to market, Nvidia just released their Quadro cards with DX11, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I went all-out; 10-bit monitor, two Quadro cards and 24GB of RAM. Partially as an experiment to see if I could sidestep obsolescence, but mostly just to build a great machine. The most expensive item was the RAM. Get ready kids...it was an almost unbelievable $1100. I still think it payed off though. I haven’t spent time thinking about it, or spent money on it since.
Note: The only game I play is agar.io.
Homemade gif for your time: