Options for my old gamer pc

techguy

Hi there,

So I have a PC I built in 2008.. which I am hoping to recommission to play some Age of Empire and Command and Conquer. I'm not interested in spending big bugs as this is still a decent enough machine for older games.

The issue is that when I recently started it up.. it hung on the Windows 7 starting screen. Black screen with the waving windows "flag".

Any ideas on what might have caused the Windows boot to hang.

Also, what are chances of getting Windows 10 to work on this? I am not sure the board will support the UEFI magic..:/

Thank you.

Spec:

Intel Q6600 2.4 Ghz Quad Core
Abit IP35 Pro Mobo
8 GB RAM
AIT Radeon 5850 or something similar.
Corsair PSU
40 GB SSD
Large HDD

mordeith

Could be any number of reasons. How many times have you tried to boot? Does it get stuck in the same place?

Cordell

Windows 7 is an end of life product, it's not worth to try to revive it, just do a clean install of Windows 10 which should have absolutely no issue running on your system.
If the SSD is from that vintage, maybe spend a bit on a newer one (I think 30E will get you a 120G cheap but good enough SSD), also with 40G you are a bit on the low side.

techguy

Ok thanks guys. I tried it a few times and hung in the same place most of the time.

I did get a USB stick to boot an Ubuntu installer to test out too.. but that also didn't make it past the POST screen strangely. I think I might have messed up the creation of that USB though... so I will try that again this evening.

* Any thing I can use to test the boot process / hardware early on in the process?
* What is the easiest and cheapest ay to get Windows 10 on the machine?
* Agreed on the 40GB SSD, I think I will snag something cheap to stick into it if all works out.

Is the any easy downloadable and legal way to get Windows 10.. and install via USB?

Thanks

Cordell

You can download Windows media creation tool from the MS site and use it to build a bootable USB or a DVD. You don't need a key or a license to install it, but you will need one after to activate it (but you can use it unactivated at least for a while).

To test the hw you need a bootable media, using Ubuntu on a USB stick was the right thing to do, you need to find out why it fails. It can be that the PC is not booting from the USB drive (select it manually), the USB stick was not build correctly, or it can even be broken.

https://rufus.ie/ use this to build the Ubuntu bootable stick, I never had any issue with it
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

techguy

Cordell wrote: »

You can download Windows media creation tool from the MS site and use it to build a bootable USB or a DVD. You don't need a key or a license to install it, but you will need one after to activate it (but you can use it unactivated at least for a while).

To test the hw you need a bootable media, using Ubuntu on a USB stick was the right thing to do, you need to find out why it fails. It can be that the PC is not booting from the USB drive (select it manually), the USB stick was not build correctly, or it can even be broken.

https://rufus.ie/ use this to build the Ubuntu bootable stick, I never had any issue with it
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

Cool thanks.. I suspect I made the USB wrong, which I have done in the past. I am using UNetbootin on Mac OS now to make a Win 10 startup disk.

I will report back. Thanks.

mordeith

techguy wrote: »

I did get a USB stick to boot an Ubuntu installer to test out too.. but that also didn't make it past the POST screen strangely.

The Ubuntu screen or the same windows screen. If the latter you may need to change boot priority in BIOS

techguy

mordeith wrote: »

The Ubuntu screen or the same windows screen. If the latter you may need to change boot priority in BIOS

Hmm, so it wasn't the boot priority thing, which I had configured.

It's very strange. Windows does actually boot now...

When booting Windows, it passes the "Verifying DMI pool data" check and proceeds to boot as normal.

But, when I have my USB inserted, it stalls at "Verifying DMI pool data".. it's weird.

Shrugs.

techguy

Right.. all good. I guess I should have known earlier in the process that using an ExFat formatted USB drive, wasn't going to work for Windows.

Anyway, using my dodgy Windows 7 instance, I used the media creation tool to setup an NTFS formatted drive to install windows.

I also used some VB Script I found online to extract the Windows 7 Ultimate key from existing install, which I entered during setup.

Going in to my system now, it says that Windows 10 Pro is activated.. does that mean I good to go?

It's nice to be giving this machine a new lease of life with Windows 10.

Thanks for the input guys....Boards.ie neve fails. Unless it's AH :D

EDIT: Apologies for the missing 'r's in some cases.. this dodgy Logitech keyboard is going back first thing tomorrow.

techguy

Just been looking at installing drivers for this..

Turns out most of the drivers are pretty much end of life too. They don't support Windows 10.

I guess that is the definition of end of life for a computer.

This won't suit my needs but is a perfect utility computer. I must figure out somewhere I can donate it.