Author: Steve Wilson

Less than a month until I move home. So expect some disruption to the site and even more erratic postings. Probably a new broadband provider, probably a new physical server as I will need to rationalise the number of physical boxes that will get moved. Four laptops have finally been retired as can’t handle Windows 11. Kept a couple back as Linux/FreeBSD test-beds, but otherwise it’s a good time for clear out for things I won’t use again.

The time had finally come to retire my Win10 workhorse. A Dell 4 core Tower PC that had originally come installed with MS Vista, then upgraded thru Win 7 and then finally Win10. Sporting 2 Optical drives, when back in the day , cloning CD’s where the rage, and then upgraded with a DVD Writer for backups was still possible to a single disc before our iCloud and OneDrives exploded with photographs or huge downloadable only games.

The graphics card had been updated several times to keep pace with games, but became less regular as I had less time for gaming and the memory maxed out at 4Gb, the max allowable for the motherboard.

I had tried several times to P2V the OS so I could dispense with the Tower, the full metal construction meant it was deadweight to move around to connect up to the TV, Ethernet and mice/keyboard ever time I needed to access some older programs to achieve a task. In my desire to be modern, I had used Disk2VHD several times to create a VHDX file, only for HyperV on my new Win11 workhorse to cry foul and refused to run.

A quick rummage of some old PC Pro back issues on the P2V process and sticking with the older plain VHD format brought forth a bootable image and then I was finally able to strip the heavy iron beast of its SSDs, Memory, Graphic Card, Multimedia Card adapter and Optical drives for potential reuse (More likely to sit in a box for another 10 years before I accept I won’t ever use them again)

I now have a usable Win10 image of the older apps and utilities I still occasionally need and one less physical device sitting around.

Just to add to the melee of updates, while the P2V process was happening I decided to resurrect an old Netgear Managed switch to permanently cable up some of the PCs kicking around, so I did not have to keep moving my trailing ethernet cable around. Seemed a good idea at the time, but they had been previously used and fixed on a different subnet and needed a laptop on the same IP range as them to re-configure. My DHCP server hands outs 192.168.1.x ids, they had been configured for 192.168.0.x. so I needed to set a manual configuration so the laptop could see both the Switch and the Gateway so it could manage updating the switch.

The Win10 IP manual configuration process was a royal PITA as instead of a usual subnet mask it just wanted the subnet mask value. eg. 16 oppose to 255.255.254.0 but was not very clear, just kept throwing errors messages to check the IP addresses submitted. Once the current subnet value had been submitted it all worked hunky-dory and I was also able to update the device Ip, name and firmware so its is now recognised on the home lan properly.