2012
I was weak, and bought another mini PC… I nearly bought a different one, but in the end went for an identical model to the last one, for cross-compatibility & familiarity. It’s called a Trigkey Green G4 and offers a crazy amount of processing power for around £160.
It’s all part of, bizarrely, actually simplifying my computing life. I’ve sold four out of five Raspberry Pis, the WacMacWiniMini is gone, as is a crappy old Acer Aspire One, and three more old laptops are for sale on eBay, though noöne seems to be buying those. I’ll just lower the prices until they go. Getting all those machines ready for sale was a saga in itself, but not one I documented here, as there was A LOT. The only useful thing I remember was when trying to get into the BIOS on the HP laptop, I needed to have an external keyboard plugged in to press the key to get BIOS or boot menu. That’s by design, for some reason, which is just zarking stupid.
ANYWAY
The point of this mini PC is to have its guts removed and those guts placed into an also-gutted original Playstation chassis to be used as a retrogames emulator.. This was a project I started more than a decade ago; it was to be a Sonyberry Pistation (a name I was very proud of coining at the time) with a Raspberry Pi in the Playstation case. Having resolved to not faff around with Pis or Linux anymore, I’m just going to use a Windows PC. It will be far easier.
Well, it should be easier…
Windows 11 has a lot of annoying features which will have to be worked-around, or gotten used to, just like when I made the migration to Windows 10; it was painful, but I dealt with it.
One annoyance with Windows 11 is that older versions didn’t allow for Taskbar icons to remain uncombined and to show labels; this ‘feature’ (which should be default) didn’t appear until later versions when people, rightly, complained about it.
Well, these mini PCs come with an older version of Win11 (21H2) which DOESN’T have the taskbar options, so Windows needs updating to the latest version. I remember this happening on the first Trigkey I bought, months back, and posted on Reddit about it at the time, where people told me to update (even though Windows claimed it was up-to-date):
https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsHelp/comments/1fgvz9y/missing_taskbar_behaviors_are_driving_me_mad/
I must have got it to work then (didn’t I…?) but this little PC just kept claiming it was up-to-date when it blatantly sodding wasn’t.
Back to Reddit.
I followed a link in one of the replies to Microsoft’s Windows 11 installation page:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows11/
Which seems like a dumbass way to go about getting updates.
Anyway, I went with the first option: download the Installation Assistant, cos I couldn’t be bothered to download the media and make a bootable USB. So lazy.
I began the procedure, and it ERRRRED with Error 0x8007007f. Back to Reddit? Yup:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/q1jisz/anyone_else_seeing_error_0x8007007f_when_trying/
It seems the consensus on a solution is to run the Assistant as admin, which shouldn’t be necessary, but hey, this is still easier than Linux!
IN OTHER NEWS
I’m rethinking the striped drive I made on the old massive box computer; I think I’ll unstripe it and just spread the backed-up data across the drives manually. It seems if something goes wrong with just one of the striped drives, all data is lost across all of them because they’re all in one volume: one dead disk = a whole dead volume.
Stupid sign-in options: something on this page worked:
