I hold out the hope that Brexit might be a bit more whimpery than the other thing.
Aye, but will be dependent on who's in charge come the actual day. :-Y
Anyway, here's a ridiculous thing about my backup PC because I knew you're all hanging on my every word, I got a replacement motherboard (different make) and stuffed it and all the working bits in a new case and plugged it in and - FUCK ME! A few minutes of hesitation, wiggle the video cable and reboot - and it all works perfectly. No OS reinstall, no non-functioning devices, no exclamation marks in device manager*, not even anything odd in event viewer. It's as though the Update Pixie, or Sooty, has sprinkled my new build with oofle-dust and Izzy-Wizzy Lets Get Busy it all just works. Backups are back-upping, Plex is Plexxing.
*well, one, because of shitty Intel AMT which I hope a BIOS update will lose
I think Willy wants to get busy with you.
Have you finished the music thing?
I've lost track.
Well, I wanted to be able to leave it alone again for a few years.
...Oh, and it invalidated the Windows license key and 'deactivated' it. But using an old Windows 7 key worked fine.
Got all the bits now but haven't got round to building it yet.
But the tiny little motherboard and case are very cute.
Here they are next to a medium tower case and my size 9 for scale.
Teeny.
What was the reason for STX over a NUC or similar barebones "nettop" type device.
Though I know nettops aren't exactly widespread these days.
There are quite a few mini-PCs around from companies like Beelink and AcePC. They vary in spec from very low-powered Atoms and Celerons up to i7 with 16GB tbh. Most come with Windows 10 or a flavour of Android. That's fine, but I also wanted to have at least 2TB of disk space accessible over ethernet (Gigabit) with a further 2TB to back up the main disk. Almost none of the barebones or built boxes allow for additional drives. I could probably do it using external drives plugged into a mini-PC but there's a huge difference between transferring files over a Gigabit link and over a Gigabit link plus a USB port. Anyway, it was all starting to look a bit cumbersome for something I want to sit in view.
The little Silverstone case has room for a couple of 2.5" drives with proper mounting points. The STX board has 2 SATA headers and comes with matching connectors, plus it has an M.2 slot for a third (PCIe) drive to boot from. So I can put everything into one box and hang a little Cyrus DAC from a USB port at the back. I can control the lot with an eSYNiC mini keyboard and use the telly as a monitor.