Woohoo! I'm windows free
1Server video card upgraded to a GTX1650, total overkill for the job it needs to do but that way the fans never run. It's sitting not far above ambient whereas the fanless card it replaces used to sit ~ 83ºC
Memory upgraded - turned out it only had 2Gb not 4, it now has 16. Thank you to Maverick for your offer of help with this
It took 4 attempts to get RAM that would work, it is one fussy motherboard. I still think Corsair suck donkey balls for selling significantly different RAM (different number of chips and different SPD data) with the same part number and appearance. The one set sold on ebay so far has recovered my costs inc postage, fingers crossed for the other two sets.
Test installation of Mint & surgemail blow away & all reinstalled fresh.
With a little help from technical support, Surgemail moved from Windows to Linux
Now here's the kicker, Surgemail right up to the latest version was running just fine thank you very much on Windows XP. Sometime around late 2011 I upgraded the hard disks in it to 500Gb hybrids but only allocated 78Gb to XP (and today 62Gb are still free). The rest of the space sat untouched waiting for me to install 7.
Surgemail absolutely flies on the new installation. It was fast on XP, the last truly cruft free (or freeable) OS to come out of Redmond. But with SSDs instead of hybrids, 6Gb/sec PCIE card instead of the 3Gb/sec mobo controller and the RAID card being capable of parallel reads (I get about 8.5Gb/sec off them) it is delicious. If you run RAID I strongly recommend picking up an old Adaptec off the bay of E, at £25 for the card and £15 for the cable (the £3 cables on the bay don't work) they are silly cheap.
Server should be good for many more years, certainly to the EOL of Mint 19 in 2023.
1 Lie, I still have:
- a laptop on Win 7, this will be my only 'available' Win machine. It'll just sit there Justin. The laptop I use is identical and was the 1st machine Minted up several years ago.
- Dual boot on the desktop. Win7 now only gets used for reading my thermochrons and that'll end if I ever get java and the Maxim reader working on Mint.
- Dual boot on the server but it'll never go back to Windows unless something catastrophic happens.
Also in the house there is:
- Mrs Tween's Win 10 laptop - awful thing. Going to be minted when I get time.
- Mrs Tween's old laptop - considerably less awful so that'll stay 10
So if all goes to plan eventually the only Win hardware in this house will be our 2nd fiddle laptops.