Many moons ago my uncle gave me this Lenovo Ideacentre 310S-08asr which belonged to my great aunt. It was running Win 10 but on a 1TB HDD. It gets worse. Only 4GB ram. It still gets worse. This is sporting a 15W TDP laptop-grade 2 core AMD A9-9425. This is a SFF or small form factor machine so it actually runs on a 65W laptop style power supply (DC input).
In retrospect I don't think upgrading this was worth it but for a tad under $100 I did the following:
- Samsung 500GB SSD (SATA 3)
- 16GB RAM
- 3.5" to 2.5" drive carrier adapter
Cloned the old drive to the new drive with Clonezilla which took a little fiddling with Clonezilla but also disk partition managers (both windows and Niubi from the other thread) before and after cloning. But it all worked.
Windows is up to date and I have my profile on here.
Installed a version of VirtualBox and copied my MB stuff over. It works! So if the original plan was to make a garage PC (inclusive of MB WIS/EPC) then I have completed my task.
Garage PC functions include:
- WIS/EPC as mentioned
- Connect to speakers for music? I usually use my phone via a bluetooth receiver which I may still do. Also I could connect my phone using that app to text via keyboard and stuff.
- Copy my entire legacy MP3 collection to this? I don't have any country music though so I don't see how I could work on cars without it....
- General purpose internet box for unit conversions and other things without having to go inside or even touch my phone.
All I need now is....a work bench on which to place this sweet rig.
Posted from the new system in fine tradition. Keyboard is acceptable.
I could build a simple shelf for it. I probably don't want it on the bench top anyway due to pounding (even with SSD).
"New" garage PC
Re: "New" garage PC
Throwing some pics in here for future entertainment.
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Re: "New" garage PC
BIOS update and other stuff.
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Re: "New" garage PC
So with Windows 10 support ending in October, I realized that my Windows 10 setup on the Lenovo is maybe not the most permanent thing ever.
The solution? Linux Mint, of course. The number one thing this machine has to do is run my Mercedes WIS/EPC virtual system. Is Virtual Box available for Linux? Of course it is. It helped that Adam informed me that he is doing exactly this on his own Linux laptop. Well then.
After changing the boot order to USB first, it booted just fine from the flash drive I originally made for the Vaio. But the Mint boot system somehow handles both a conventional BIOS and uEFI on the same system, automatically. So this boot loader is totally different than what I got on the Vaio (and HTPC).
Linux Mint does support secure boot but I would have to set a password. And I think I read somewhere that the keys changed from when the boot disk was last made which would cause me to have to set it up again after installing or other annoyance. I decided that was more trouble than it was worth and just turned secure boot off and tried again. That's better. Now that Mint was running, time to find the right Virtual Box. Mint is currently Ubuntu 24.04 underneath so I just downloaded and ran that package.
It installed with no issues. Next, I already had my entire Mercedes virtual system folder on a portable hard drive so I just copied the entire thing over. It was over 100GB but that seemed to include 4 archives (8.5GB each) that added additional bloat. I copied it all anyway. Impressively this USB HDD sustained 120MB/sec which would saturate a 1Gbit ethernet link. Ran Virtual Box, pointed it to the folder, and it saw everything. The system would not start from the saved state so I had to select to forget the saved state and boot from cold virtual metal. No problem. Success! And some pricing software thing that I never noticed that seems pretty useless. I even found a nice Pandora app in the software manager that seems to work great. Now all I need is a bench in my garage so I can put this somewhere. Quite pleased.
The solution? Linux Mint, of course. The number one thing this machine has to do is run my Mercedes WIS/EPC virtual system. Is Virtual Box available for Linux? Of course it is. It helped that Adam informed me that he is doing exactly this on his own Linux laptop. Well then.
After changing the boot order to USB first, it booted just fine from the flash drive I originally made for the Vaio. But the Mint boot system somehow handles both a conventional BIOS and uEFI on the same system, automatically. So this boot loader is totally different than what I got on the Vaio (and HTPC).
Linux Mint does support secure boot but I would have to set a password. And I think I read somewhere that the keys changed from when the boot disk was last made which would cause me to have to set it up again after installing or other annoyance. I decided that was more trouble than it was worth and just turned secure boot off and tried again. That's better. Now that Mint was running, time to find the right Virtual Box. Mint is currently Ubuntu 24.04 underneath so I just downloaded and ran that package.
It installed with no issues. Next, I already had my entire Mercedes virtual system folder on a portable hard drive so I just copied the entire thing over. It was over 100GB but that seemed to include 4 archives (8.5GB each) that added additional bloat. I copied it all anyway. Impressively this USB HDD sustained 120MB/sec which would saturate a 1Gbit ethernet link. Ran Virtual Box, pointed it to the folder, and it saw everything. The system would not start from the saved state so I had to select to forget the saved state and boot from cold virtual metal. No problem. Success! And some pricing software thing that I never noticed that seems pretty useless. I even found a nice Pandora app in the software manager that seems to work great. Now all I need is a bench in my garage so I can put this somewhere. Quite pleased.
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