So last week my desktop finally kicked the bucket after ten years of being a cheaply-made yet reliable little machine. It survived the better part of those ten years in a heavy smoking area. So I do my due diligence and do an autopsy on it... rapid-onset capacitor failure. Damn things popped like popcorn. Most of them were Rubycon MBZ series caps. It hangs in the middle of POST, I'm frankly surprised it gets that far. One day out of the blue it went down with a BSOD and was just never able to come back up.
Prepping the case, drives and power supply for my graduation build: MSI H110M-VD Pro, Celeron G3900 (still comfortably faster even than my Core2Duo, and has the potential to be upgraded to an i7 at just about any time should I need it), 1x8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport LX PC4-19200 (gives me room to upgrade to 16GB quickly and easily if I need/want to). The integrated graphics are just a hair slower than the HD4650 I was using, but will use much less power and support more hardware decoding of video, not to mention the driver support will be better just about anywhere I go that isn't XP. The VD part of the motherboard refers to the video ports on offer, 1 VGA and 1 DVI, which is what my twin monitors use. I might go one step further to the Eco model, which also has an HDMI port. It's decent for expansion as far as I need/want, is decent for performance, and should barely sip power compared to the A64X2, all for a decent price all told at about ~$150 total.
The power supply should do fine. The load should be less than it was with the A64X2 board, and I checked inside and everything seems just dandy bar some dust I had to clean out. The board does not require a "Haswell ready" auxilary CPU power connection, just uses good old 4-pin P4 power.
In other news the STLP state conference came and went. STLP stands for student technology leadership program, it's a Kentucky thing apparently. I was in it some time ago, even won the state championship at Elementary/Middle level in the computer repair challenge back in eighth grade. I tagged along for the Certipalooza event they were having there. Long story short I got my MTA certs in OS Fundamentals, Networking Fundamentals, and Security Fundamentals in short order, only spending about five minutes on each test and scoring a 94, 77 and 80 respectively. Not bad for never having had a class on the last two. The practice test had my friends and I both thinking we were going to fail spectacularly. I walked out with the most certs out of anyone in the state, and got a prize for my troubles. It's being sent to the school now, as are my cert certificates or whatever they are.
On the subject of my using Windows 10, I turned off all the privacy concerns and telemetry settings using Spybot S&D creator's Anti-Beacon. Seems to do the job, also handles reapplying of the settings in the event that they are reset by updates as they are wont to do. I also use Avast free and Spybot S&D free itself for protection, had a bit of a scare recently and got scared straight. This team of programs is just about the only one that I feel it's worth running on older machines such as my laptop. Just about everything else brings the computer to their knees while doing absolutely nothing, it's crazy.