Since I had a little time on my hands (that was sarcasm) I installed an old ATI Radeon X300 PCIe video card into an Windows 10 system.   The ATI X300 was from MSI and it has DVI, svideo and VGA output.  The mainboard was an Intel DG33BU, onboard graphics was working fine just didn't support the resolution I needed (1366 x 768) for the monitor (Westinghouse LCD TV 27").  

First off, I know both the card and the monitor are old, but if they aren't broke then we don't need to replace 'em....  That being said, I didn't want to use a new Nvidia PCIe card and I have a few of these X300's collecting dust.  Installed the card, of course Windows 10 didn't have a driver and the generic driver didn't show the correct resolution (which I knew before installing the card).  Did a quick Google search for a driver and found lots of choices must of which didn't install properly or were for other newer models of video card.  AMD's site didn't have anything that old that I could find anyway. Turns out ATI Catalyst 8.11 contains a driver for the X300 and works with Windows 10 (it is a Vista 64 app).  Other newer versions of Catalyst might work as well, but 8.11 was the first one that worked for me so I'll just keep it for now.   Later on, might try some other Catalyst versions.   Multiple versions of Catalyst can be downloaded from descargas.hispazone.org/Programas/Catalyst.

Normally, I would not have installed the full Catalyst software and only installed the driver but the monitor has the picture moved over to the right too far.  I used the Catalyst software to move the picture back to the left.

Bottom line, it works fine seems fast enough for desktop work and YouTube videos, happy camper.

Just installed Windows 10 Pro (x64) using 2gb of memory!  Yes, that lame-o amount of memory worked fine.  I did not say it worked well!  Performance is very lacking after installing a few third party programs, especially AVG Internet Security suite and IOBit Advanced SystemCare.  With only the operating system, 2gb of memory actually performed quiet quickly.  I was impressed.  The system was just an old D945GCCR mainboard with Intel E4500 processor.  Disk drive was also old SATA-II Western Digital Blue 250GB.

All-in-All, this system could be used on a desktop for basic (very basic) use (word processing, spreadsheets, etc) but hooking up to Internet and being more productive.... needs more memory.

Bottom line, it is worth it (in my humble opinon) to do the free Windows 10 upgrade from Windows 7.  If your hardware is older,  just upgrade the hardware (add more memory, maybe faster processor, etc.) later when you can.   Can't beat free, Microsoft ends the free upgrade soon.

Just for the heck if it, I decided to upgrade an old Acer 3610 notebook to Windows 10.  I know that is a waste of time, money and effort...right?   Well we'll see.  First off the Acer 3610 is a Intel Celeron M 370 32-bit.  Weak performance by any stretch.  Well that chipset is Intel 910GML which does support Pentium M's.  Will try a Pentium M later on but for now, we'll keep our amazingly fast (scarcasm)  1.5GHz Celeron 400FSB processor.  Disk drive was 40gb IDE so that had to go, replaced with SSD IDE (well probaby compact flash inside but interface is IDE none the less).  That helped the disk performance bottleneck.  Memory is limited to 2gb.  Major bottleneck here but we'll deal with it.  The system has 3gb installed (2gb SODIMM and 1gb SODIMM) but Windows can only access 2gb since the Intel 910GML chipset.  Didn't have another 1gb stick so we'll waste 1gb of memory for the time being.    Now for the fun part....

Still had a few Windows 8.1 keys from our MSDN membership, so installing that to get Windows 10 thru Windows Update.  Installation was normal and surprisingly quick.  All drivers were found except using basic Microsoft video driver. Time for ReadyBoost, need to milk everything we can to get some performance.  I know that stinks too but better than nothing.  Installed a Kingston 2gb USB drive for ReadyBoost.  USB interface is only 2.0. Replaced the wireless card to a N mode card to milk that performance, but for now still using the wired 10/100 port.  Windows update.... wow this famous for stinking with low memory or even medium amounts of memory.  Mega memory hog, this will be painful.  Yes, it was.  a few hours later Windows 8.1 shows me the Windows 10 upgrade icon now.  Let's do it.

Windows 10 downloaded and is installing as we speak (blog).  "Configuring update for Windows 10. 15% complete" so far.   Okay, maybe the processor upgrade should have been done first...  Okay maybe this project should not have even started but I am curious.   I will come in a few.

Just looked over at the notebook, we are to the black "Updating Windows" and "11% screen".  Making progress, slowly but progress.

Well, Windows 10 install finished sometime over night.  It does work but I wouldn't call it usable.  It is in much need of more horsepower.    Will try to determine which kind, CPU, memory or all of the above.  My money is on the CPU is just too darn slow, don't see a lot of disk access so probably not paging.  Task Manager says mega CPU usage on interrupts, guessing video driver since no 910GML driver for Windows 10.   Only XPDM.

Don't think it is worth trying another processor without video support.
Just too old guess it's limit will be Windows 7.

Decided to do some long overdue software updating last week on one of our Fedora servers.  We are now running OpenSSL 1.0.2e, CURL 7.47.7 with HTTP/2, Apache 2.4.18 with HTTP/2 and PHP 5.5.32.   Our main web app still uses PHP's mysql interface which is now deprected.  We are having to change to mysqli which is easy for the most part just takes time to make some of the necessary changes.  Some places have direct mysql calls but most have them in wrapper functions so it will be easy to update.

As of today (02/26/2016), it appears all the mysql functions have been switched to mysqli.  Yay.  Might just go ahead with PHP 5.6 or 7 soon.  Not enough hours in the day.

The Fedora server is still version 8 by name but that is just about where it stops.  Being a geek, I update things using the source and build them myself... tweek here and there never hurts either :)

Had an old ATI X1550 video card start to fail on me today in a Windows 10 Pro desktop box here at the shop.  I know it is old but it still worked fine.  Didn't really want to stick a new card in this system so looked around at our spare video cards.  Still had an old Nvidia 6200LE card.   I like a challenge, so we'll give that a go.   I know Microsoft will complain about it and say it is not compatible and probably even Nvidia's own site will say the same.

Here we go, removed the ATI card, do not see any physical damage but it has had a few caps replaced in the past, so maybe they are bad again or perhaps another issue... that is for later post.   Installed the Nvidia card.  Powered on and Microsoft did the normal default video driver and poor resolution.  Went over to the Nvidia driver download site and put in my video card information and sure enough there is a Windows 8 x64 driver.  Slightly surprised, I was guessing it would be Vista driver.  Downloaded and Installed the Nvidia driver. Working perfectly.  Windows is also working perfectly with all the normal video related pretty whistles and bells turned on.  I am a happy camper.

This Nvidia card has....wait for it.... wait for it.... 64mb of video memory.  I remember having discussions with my techs here at the shop where they would all say they needed mega memory for their video cards and they could see the performance difference using desktop apps.  I always said they were mistaken but nobody would ever listen.  This once again proves that I was right....  just sayin'.    Of course if you need 1000 fps rate on your first person shooter then old video cards are not for you.  Desktop applications do not need that.

Windows 10 Update1511,10586

Microsoft gave all of us an annoying update awhile back called Upgrade to Windows 10 (Pro/Home) 1511, 15086.  Like most Microsoft updates, it brings in fixes, security updates, etc. but one major annoying side effect is removal of software Microsoft does not want you to have installed.   One such application is CPU-Z.  Completely harmless application that shows you specs of various hardware items.  Current CPU, amount and speed of memory, mainboard BIOS version, all tech stuff that must users do not understand nor need to.  I enjoy running this program, due to upgrading processors and memory constantly.  It provides you with quick one stop shop of all the data I need to know if that current system can handle a faster processor and which processor along with if more memory can be added and what kind.   Sure you can figure out this info from other built-in sources and some internet searches, but I don't want to.  Every single time this Microsoft update has been installed it has removed CPU-Z because it doesn't work on this version of Windows.   Hmmmmm... it works very well thank you.  So far that is the only program we usually install that has been removed.  (If have read reports of CCleaner, Cisco VPN client and certain SATA drivers being removed as well).  I understand why Microsoft is doing this, everybody wants a stable system but the programs they are removing do not make the system un-stable.  At install time the end-user should have control over what gets removed.  Okay, I know some end-users wouldn't have a clue but some do :)