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#1
Pc reclamation - the time has come
Windows 10 20H2
In these days of growing concerns about e-waste the upgrading and reclamation of older PCs ought to be taken seriously. Most PCs today can be upgraded to Windows 10. Because of TPM requirements many PCs cannot be adequately upgraded to Win 11. That said, I'm posting this thread to encourage others to share their upgrades and rescue missions of older PCs that might have been otherwise discarded, tossed in dumpsters, recycling bins etc. consequently resulting in additional years of practical use and sparing the environment of needless waste.
I would encourage others to post pictures of PCs that they have managed to rescue from the morbid fate of ending up in a dumpster, or land fill. Please share and tell what you did to upgrade the PC and make it usable again in this wonderful world of Windows 10.
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Found in a recycling bin. Dell Studio XPS 9100. Upgraded to Windows 10 20H2.
When I plugged it in the battery alarm sounded immediately and it would not post. I replaced the CMOS battery I received a different alarm so I pulled the GFX card and replaced it with a simpler graphics card. The alarm stopped beeping and it posted with an error message that Windows was attempting a repair. The repair failed but in the meantime I put the graphics card in a different PC and learned that it needed a firmware update. I gave it the update, removed the graphics card, and installed it back in the original PC. Once again it attempted a repair and the Windows 10 operating system required a repair. This time I opted to reset the operating system, which was just as well as I had no interest in the user information anyway. The reset was successful.
This unit came with a blue ray drive, an additional CD/DVD ROM drive, 24 GB of Samsung RAM, a graphics card that would have been considered high end in 2010, a quad core i7 960 CPU, and two 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT hard drives. Back in the day a unit like this would have been worth close to $3000 CA. I'm now running a 22H2 version of Windows 10 on a Crucial 500 GB SSD with this unit and because I happened to have the original DELL XPS 9000 series Windows 7 Pro DVD, it is also running the original OS via dual boot. The thing runs fast, stable and smooth. My 12 year old daughter tested it with a bunch of games including mine craft and couldn't believe that someone actually tossed this machine. She shook her head and said, "Dad, people are so wasteful". I couldn't agree more.