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Well, I wasn’t exactly planning on wiping my machine, but it was getting slower and slower by the day. I know I’ve been slacking on posting, but there’s been a lot of things going on recently.
The other weekend, my son was fed up with the kids’ computer being extraordinarily slow to do just about anything. It was running Windows 10, so at least it wasn’t being slowed down by forced Copilot junk, but I think it was a combination of an old hard drive and over five years of existing—which always slows down Windows machines.
I had thought to speed up the house Plex server by throwing two M.2 hard drives into it that were originally bought for my PC and the kids’ PC, but they didn’t work on the old 2014 HP server anyway. So we had to start by shutting down the Plex server and unracking the 50+ pound thing so we could crack it open.
After we got the hard drives out, we decided to rebuild the computer with AtlasOS, which is a gaming-centric fork of Windows 11. It cuts out all of the bloat of Windows and leaves you with a lean operating system that is ready to game. Since I run my own security tools on all the computers, I’m not too worried about losing the baked-in Windows Defender, and I’m thrilled about removing all the other bloatware.
It was relatively easy to install—just do a fresh Windows 11 install and then run the Atlas program over top of it. So far, it seems pretty smooth and quick. We’re still trying to figure out why we can’t locate his Minecraft saves on the old hard drive; it seems to be the only game where the saves didn’t want to copy over, so I guess I need to run a recovery on that drive.
Part of what has delayed me writing here, as well, is that my own computer was starting to struggle. It was last rebuilt in August of 2019 and was definitely due for a rebuild. I’ve kept my Windows drive intact as a dual-boot option, but I’m currently trying out Nobara Linux. That’s a Linux OS that is designed with gaming in mind. So far, I barely got my 1,000-tab Firefox back up and running and decided I needed to post something today before I focus on some work. Hopefully, I’ll have some games up and running soon.
~~Miniwing~~
Stoic, Parent, Investor
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