[rescue] off-topic but advice needed for the involuntary hardware upgrade for Win 11? -what I did.

[Joshua Boyd]

On 12/26/24 13:42, john ferguson via rescue wrote:
> Here's what I did - days shopping Ebay for HP Z2 G4's and Z2 G5's.  It 
> was a good suggestion because there were lots of them, I liked my 
> Elite 8300 Tower which may have been an earlier incarnation of the Z2 
> and they seem to have plenty of capacity for excess drives etc.

The Z2 family is a follow up to the Z2[024]0 family, which is a follow 
up to the XW4600 and similar machines.  The XW then Z family were the 
top "workstation" part of HP's line up.

The Elite series that the 8300 was part of has been replaced with the 
EliteDesk line of business PCs.  It is likely that there was shared 
design elements in any generation of the two families. There certainly 
were shared design elements between Dell's equivalent Precision, 
Optiplex, and XPS lines.

> At first I thought it would be good to get a Z2 G5 (newer don't you 
> know) but I quickly discovered that the more economical offerings with 
> Intel I-core processors only had 350 Watt poer supplies. 

The Z2 G5 offered 350, 500 and 700w PSU options. Across all of the used 
HP and Dell "workstation" machines, it can be a pain making sure you 
will get the PSU you want when buying used. They often can be swapped, 
but finding either the correct PSU or a harness adapter can be a pain 
and adds to the cost.

> I'm running a Nvidia GTX 1070 which would have been pushing it. but 
> eventually I found a Z2-g4, 650 watt PSU, Win11Pro, with 1TB M.2, 32 
> gigs RAM, and an I9 9900 CPU which ought to work for me. It was not 
> cheap, $612 shipping included. but should hold me for a while.

Yeah, I usually try to look for the PSU I want, and preferrably the CPU 
I want, but usually plan on upgrading the RAM and SSD myself.  Getting 
an i9-9900 should be very performant though.

> It should be here tomorrow afternoon.
>
> Thanks for the excellent advice and commentary. I don't think I even 
> knew that the HP Z2 line existed.
>
> For some reason, I thought that if MS persisted with their hardware 
> requirements to run W11, and getting close to 2026 might make old W11 
> Compatible machines a lot pricier.  ??

There definitely is a jump in price between i7-7700 and i7-8700 machines 
disproportional to their performance difference, and I'm sure that 
Windows 11 is to blame.

I still have 2 more Windows PCs at home that need an upgrade at some 
point.  One is a HP Z240, and the other is a Lenovo M900. Minecraft 
Bedrock edition is the only thing keeping me from switching them to 
being Linux machines.

Minecraft Bedrock is supported on Chromebooks, but it just occurred to 
me that the Linux mode on Chromebooks might mean I could make Java 
edition run on them, and that might free me to switch the Wintendo 
systems to Linux.  Sometimes we play Minecraft together as a family of 4.