I’m feeling old. And it’s not that I’m all that old, but this past week I realized that I had been doing personal computing for a very long time. I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with Microsoft abandoning support for Windows 10, so the other day I (almost on impulse) bought a new Dell Win 11 desktop. I got it home, connected it to my primary keyboard and mouse, and gave Win 11 a spin.
I honestly don’t understand why Microsoft keeps screwing around with its UIs. The Win 11 desktop is no better than Win 10’s, and in many ways quirky enough to demand close attention to what you’re doing, or trying to do. I’m sure Win 11 has improvements in terms of security and use of resources and other back-of-the-screen stuff, but why the hell do I have to learn the UI all over again?
The biggest question was whether the software I depend on will even run on it. A number of (ok, ancient) utilities refused to run on Windows 7, which will probably always remain my favorite version. So I installed a few significant packages, and they all worked just fine. Plus, the new machine has an SD card slot in the case near the USB ports, which my older (but not ancient) Optiplex 5070 does not. I also found that the new machine did not have a speaker audio port on the back panel. That irritated me at first, but I now understand why it isn’t there. (More on this later.)
As I always do, I popped the side panel and took a look inside, figuring I’d order an M.2 SSD for the empty slot. Except…there was no empty slot. There was one M.2 slot, with a terabyte SSD in it. The machine was misrepresented by a sales person: She said that it had two M.2 slots on it, and one of them was empty. It wasn’t empty. It simply wasn’t there.
And another thing wasn’t there: The machine could not put video into my Samsung 214T 21” 1600 X 1200 4:3 flat monitor, which I bought around 2007. It didn’t support that resolution at all. My Win 10 machine has no trouble with 1600 X 1200. The new Win 11 machine, I discovered, was configured to do a wide-screen 1920 X 1080. I swapped in my only widescreen monitor and boom! There was 1920 X 1080. It would do lower resolutions, but most of those were not 4:3.
By now I was in part disappointed and in part annoyed. My older widescreen monitor is a Dell 22” diagonal and works very well. But it’s not especially large, and I wanted something to make the type larger to reduce eyestrain. I require at least two mass-storage units in my primary machine, so after two days of messing with the Win 11 box, I uninstalled the half-dozen packages I had installed, put it back in its box, and trucked it back to the store. As I expected, they accepted the return, and were very courteous about it. While I was there, I took a close look at a larger Dell monitor, an S2725H. It’s a 27” diagonal, and has almost no bezel around the top and sides. It’s basically all screen but for a small strip on the bottom edge. So I had no trouble fitting it into my computer table setup, which includes the 5070 mini-tower and a laser printer plus other odd junk. It was inexpensive and can display two manuscript pages side by side. Video adjustments are done with a sort of mini-joystick: a little nubbin on the back of the monitor selects which aspect you want to change, followed by a line graph showing how much. Push the nubbin in the right direction and you’re there. Push down on the nubbin to press Enter. Clever, and a lot easier to do than I expected.
My venerable 214T has DVI input, and once I bought my Win 10 machine several years ago (2021?) I needed to use an HDMI to DVI adapter. DVI is long extinct. Desktops are now either DisplayPort or HDMI. (Or in some cases, both.) What I guess I knew in the back of my head but didn’t think about in terms of personal computers is that HDMI (and DisplayPort) carry sound as well as video. And yup, inside that new monitor is a pair of formidable hi-fidelity speakers. Heretofore I had used a cheap set of mini-speakers that sounded, well, cheap and small. Once I played several classical MP3s and some videos into the new monitor, the sound was terrific compared to what had been.
So there was no little green audio jack in the back panel of the Win 11 machine. It had a headphone jack on the front panel, but all the speaker audio went out through HDMI.
I learned a few things in this recent adventure:
- Don’t buy a computer on impulse. Research the hell out of it before you slap down your credit card. Dell, at least, has all of its manuals available for free download as PDFs. Look for machines that appeal to you and then go through their manuals. Repeat until you find what you like the most, and will do the jobs you need it to do.
- A lot of monitors, by now probably most of them, contain stereo speakers. Audio comes out the same cable video does.
- 4:3 monitors, like rear-panel audio jacks, are extinct.
- Win 11 is inevitable, as much as I’d prefer it to be seriously evitable.
I’m still wrassling with the last point. I suspect I will run a full backup on the 5070 sometime soon and install 11 on it. It does what I need it to do. I only hope and pray that Win 11 won’t hide anything important or paint me into any corners. We’ll see.
