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All things come to an end - plan for it

In 2011 I built a PC with an i7 2600k that stood me in good stead until two weeks ago.  I had upgraded disks, memory and video cards over the years, but while upgrading my memory, I must have flexed the 9 year old mother board more than it wanted and I got an ugly sight:


That is the CPU fail LED glowing to show me that the computer was dead :-(

My how PC building has changed in 9 years!  Due to work commitments I couldn't take the time to build it's replacement, but the folks at MicroCenter hooked me up with a very nice AMD build.  I got it home, double checked that it would POST correctly and I was off to the races.

First, I installed my drives from my old PC into the new box, turned it on and nothing.  I forgot to put the boot configuration into compatibility mode!  My old drives were created before UEFI, so I needed to turn that one.  One change and bingo!

got the Windows boot screen.  A little nervious waiting while it said that it was configuring for new devices (like the whole computer) and then I was greeted with the login prompt.  That never would worked with an older windows version.

Login and 
 Ok not good, but let's not give up - try my non-administrator login and I was in.  Why?  Well, since I didn't have the chance to remove stuff before my computer died, I had old drivers and windows can't fix what it doesn't know about.  The ASUS AI Suite was still starting and it didn't have either the motherboard nor the CPU it was expecting.  It's not surprising it wasn't compatible.

So, disable that (by renaming the AsIO.sys file first, then disabling the program at startup).  Now everything is working and I just need to re-register windows, et. al. and it pretty much all works.  It's even more stable than before.

I do have one critical item to complete before I declare total victory, I need to transfer my backup software license to my "new" hardware with the "old" configuration.

What can we learn from this:
  1. Having backups increases the likelihood that you won't need them - perhaps I'm paranoid, but I'm sure the driver updates would not have worked if I didn't have multiple backups of my system.
  2. Applying the least privilates rule that you use in software development to your personal computer is a great idea.  Because I had a "clean" account that didn't try and start anything and didn't have any real permissions, I was able to diagnose and fix the defunct install without having to go into Windows Recovery mode or anything like that.
Anyway, I back - here's to hoping my current PC lasts another 9 years before it needs to be replaced.

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