(^&*&^% Server stuff

 ... and I say that like I actually have servers ... 

Background:

• Wife had an old Dell Inspiron PC with Vista on it. (Yeah, me too, I choked on bile while I typed that.) It currently has a Win7 salvaged from my old laptop and re-installed, and to say the least, it's slower. We use it as a file and media server but it's becoming an issue, the external drive that most every file resides on drags the power bus down so far that it won't boot with the drive plugged in.
  
  So it's what you might call sub-optimal for even that purpose, and then I recently had to put my 3D printing files and all the stuff I'm working on into that drive too, so work is currently at a crawl.
  
  
• I bought a 2nd hand bitzer from a PC shop, pretty much wasted my money. It has a dodgy USB bus that loses track of ports in a heartbeat, only 2G RAM (just like the Dell, come to think of it) and because the techie added an SSD, it takes about five minutes to reboot while it re-identifies the drive - every reboot. Warm or cold. 
  
  It was supposed to be the machine that all the development work was done on but it doesn't have 3D capable graphics card, and I can't even get reliable USB communications with the 3D printer to use Repetier Host or any software to help manage the printer. 
  
  

Sooooo...  Not ideal, and it puts a serious crimp in everything I do. My underpowered laptop can do my 3D graphics work - but ever so slowly - and because I tried to speed it up with an SSD, it hasn't got enough space for the files. So they live on (See Inspiron, *sigh*, and also known as "BUNNY" on the network) that machine, where it can sometimes take three minutes to open a remote Explorer window on a directory on that external drive. . .

And Now:

So I recently bought two little 256G SSDs from Aliexpress and when they arrived I initialised them, and then used Macrium Reflect to clone the system drive of the 2nd (aka Bitzer or, more properly, "KIDDENS" because most of my computers have pet-related names) machine and then installed that as the primary drive. 

And surprise of surprises! It's not the SSD being some shonky make that is causing the motherboard to not recognise the drive - it's the F)&()ing motherboard itself. Yay for me. Most useless POS I ever wasted my money on. . . 

So kept the old SSD in it (and yep for anyone playing along at home I changed the CMOS battery and it made no difference, it's the BIOS itself apparently) and bunged the newly-cloned SSD into Bunny, put a USB stick with a fresh W10 install in, and am now sitting while it works out whether I can install it or will I need to get a 32bit Win10. (No I am not kidding I can't make this stuff up it's so sad and annoying...)

At least they both got a half-hearted dust out and wiring moved around and tidied up a bit. Oh yeah dust. We live with the window of the hobby/craft room about 12m away from a major regional highway and so I vacuum all our machines out about every six months to clear the dust crust out of vents and fans, otherwise they start to get a mite warm. Only the 3D printer has a dust-proof enclosure.

I'll update this before I post it, I just wanted you to understand why I often feel like I'm head-desking more than the average techie should ought to . . . 

UPDATE:

Yep - BUNNY is now updated to the win10 installation and seems to be working as well as before but file access is still woeful.

KIDDENS is as it was before, and the idea of some accelerator and a box of matches looks so enticing - if only I could replace the damn thing with a real computer...

A day in my life. Five minutes to midnight. Peace out.