I have been staring at my blog page for months, trying to think of something interesting to write about. It could be the process of purchasing our latest house, and along with that selling our motorhome. I could write about that, but it is a bit boring. So what to put down on this electronic paper that will help people?

I decided it might be good for folks to know what to do now that Microsoft has officially announced the date they will kill off Windows 10. When that date comes you have two, make those three choices.

1. Ignore the date and keep using the Windows PC that you have now. (Not a good choice)

2. Buy a new Windows 11 PC (not a bad choice if educated as to what to purchase)

3. Leave Windows altogether. (That is up to you but you will have a huge learning curve if you do.)

Let’s take a closer look at choice number 2. The day after I received an email from a friend of mine, who owns a computer store in Virginia Beach, telling me that Microsoft is pulling the plug on Windows 10, I ordered a new computer. I saw no reason to wait almost 18 months. None of my three eleven-year-old laptops nor my wife’s tablet are upgradable to Windows 11 and to make matters worse, the one I used the most took all day to install the monthly Windows 10 updates. It made no difference if they were security or feature updates. I had to hold my breath and hope the PC would not crash. More than once it did. I had put up with enough trouble when it could not install a security update due to a hard drive partition being too small and no way to enlarge it. Every time I checked for updates it would try to install this troublesome and not needed bundle of bits and cost me hours of not being able to do a thing with it. The solution was to jump on Amazon and pull the trigger on a unit that I had been looking at for quite some time.

I finally had a big reason to buy it. And based on past experiences with previous versions of Windows, like XP, 8, 8.1, and that awful Vista, support starts to fade before the version is gone for good. Or you are forced to pay for it if you want support and updates. That is not something I am going to do.

I don’t claim to be an expert, but I owned and operated a telephone, computer, and computer networking company with my wife and son for twenty-five years. We sold and installed Voice Mail systems that operated on Windows 2000 and Windows NT. Both of those were very stable operating systems. Windows 11, seems to be quite reliable so far, in my estimation.

I have not had anything but a laptop for the past eleven years. I was ready, now that we are in a house again, to go back to having a desktop. I wanted a desktop with two 23-inch monitors. This arrangement is most helpful when editing photographs, writing a blog with lots of images, and comparing bank statements to what is in my Quicken register. One window is open on one screen and a different window on the other. I can drag a window from one to the other. That is the most helpful thing to be able to do. I chose two Acer KC242Y HD standard monitors (by standard, they do not have touch screens.)

The Acer monitor is good and has a great price of only 89.05 each. That is hard to beat. I have used products from Acer and its business line, Aopen, for years. Years ago I built desktops for gamers using Aopen motherboards and video cards.

The most important decision of course was what PC to purchase. Do I go back to using a big box under my desk with flashing lights and full of fans? Nope. I am no longer a gamer which I used to be. I was part of a gaming league back in the nineties. One of our league members was a group of folks from Electronic Arts, one of the biggest game makers in the world. My clan played against EA for fun and to test new Medal of Honor games for them. I was also the tech forum “guru” for the Ubisoft Brother in Arms series of PC games. My function was to help forum members tune their PCs to run the game when it first came out on the market. That was long ago and I am too old to be that kind of gamer but I still like a fast PC.

After much consideration and study, I purchased a mini PC. It is about half the size of a cigar box, which is helpful if you know what size a cigar box is. The unit attaches to the back of one of my monitors. The PC is a Beelink SER 5. It has an AMD Ryzen 7 processor that runs at 4.4 mgz instead of 1.4 like my Asus laptop. It has 32 GB of random access memory RAM as it is known. This is one of the reasons that the mini runs so well. RAM is like a big pocket where the program is stored temporarily for quick access, very quick. The more you have the faster the computer finds it in any order. This Beelink has a 500GB solid state “harddrive”. It is not a hard drive in the conventional sense. It has no moving parts. It is an array of chips that fits into a slot in the computer and is swift. It connects to my monitors through an HDMI and digital display or DP ports. It has four USB ports, including one USB C.

It is a perfect little PC, with a small footprint, a fast processor, and a fair amount of storage. I wish I had ordered it with a 1 TB drive, but that is not a big deal because I have a total of five drives I am using. I removed two standard drives from older laptops, connected them to the Beelink, and added that to my two external SSD drives. It came with Windows 11 Pro installed. It fired up without any trouble at all. That was a very pleasant surprise.

I write this just to explain my process in dealing with Windows 10’s end-of-life. My laptop was on its way out just like the one I recently trashed. I bought it now because I suspect that the closer to October 2025 the higher the price for a new Windows 11 unit. The prices will go up if only for a short time.

As a note, there a plenty of good laptops to be had as well for a very reasonable price. 400 dollars (around the price of my new unit) will purchase a fine laptop. It will not be as well equipped as my unit, but it has its screen of course. My strong suggestion is to make the necessary change to Windows 11 soon if you have not done so.

Leave a comment if you wish or have a question leave that also. A final note. I do like flashing lights as you can see by the image above.

Derrick

As a footnote, I was asked in the comments below: How do you know if you need to purchase a new Windows 11 PC? The answer is, to download the Microsoft PC health check program, install it, run it and it will tell you if your PC can run Windows 11, but not how well. Just click the red button below to get started. Along with that program I posted a 64-bit Windows program, PC Manager, it does all kinds of good things to help tune up your Windows 10 or Windows 11 PC. Just click it, download it, and install that as well.