Resurrection Weekend

No, not that resurrection.  That resurrection weekend is still two weeks away.  This was about as far from that as one can get. 

Back in '18, I needed a little computer that could run my Computerized Battery Analyzer (CBA-IV) and since the native software is Windows, ended up buying a small computer probably more intended for running an audio-visual setup of some kind, called a NUC, made by Intel.  It was fine for that, but it's a Windows 10 box (pretty sure it was my first introduction to Win 10) and like all Windows versions, it slows down over time as the OS gets more bloated.  As I wrote about in July '21, when I told the story of getting 3D Printer control program called Pronterface running:

To make the long story short it took a couple of days to get that to work.  Hours upon hours of those days were waiting for Windows to stop doing shit so I could do what I wanted to.  With machines that aren't on regularly, Windoze 10 is a giant Pain In The Ass - calling home and tying up the machine literally for hours over my WiFi network.

This is a computer I run maybe every few months for a day or two or maybe less than that.  Like all Windows10 computers I've seen, there's no place to tell it that I don't want it to play music files, or show me videos.  I want it to run my battery analyzer or talk to my printer interactively.  Still, every time I turn it on, it has to go look for security updates, and if I have a battery to test that I think is going to run for hours, I need to turn the NUC on two hours before I can start.  And every few cycles of that, I have to sit around and tell it, no I don't want to pay for your cloud storage, I don't want to sync my Android phone because I don't even have one, I don't want your browser because this little machine doesn't need to have a browser on it, and a bunch more crap.

Plus it does other things I personally find annoying, like changing my desktop picture to something I have on one of my other computers.  Doesn't anybody at Microsoft who designs this software think that a user might have more than one picture they want on their computers?  And they might not want them all to look the same?  How about interacting with software like, "when I want it to do something, I'll ask?"

As a result, I got pretty tired of putting up with the NUC and realized I still have the computer that used to be my desktop here, that was replaced in November of '19.  The NUC is on top of the older Dell desktop.

Resurrecting that computer and getting it to run the way it should has been the big job this weekend.  I can't say I'm done, yet.  The biggest problem was that the little CR2032 battery used to backup the clock (and whatever else) had died and getting it to even boot up took most of yesterday.  Since it's a Win 7 machine, long out of support, I don't want it going out on the network.  There are no updates for it to go find and install, so no need for WiFi to be on.  That might be part of what's slowing it down, but I really don't want it calling home all day long to check on something. 

It still takes it far too long to do simple tasks like uninstalling a file, and I'm troubleshooting that.   The root problem, though, is that I haven't had to do anything like this in years, and it has been longer since I had to work on a Win 7 machine.  The other Win 7 computer I have (runs the CNC mills and lathe) has been off the network since Win 7 went away.  It does what I need, when I need it to, every time I turn it on.