Looking to upgrade my windows 10 desktop

You can get a free upgrade to 11, as long as you W10 was legit

I have 4 PC's, one an old Dell W10 where the hard drive went on it. Bought a new HD and got a free upgrade to 11. The other 2 were bought with 11 (one for work) and the last was one of those cheapie £200 mini PC's, which works surprisingly well, also on 11.

My 2 new PC's were bought in Currys. Some good deals there (circa £500)

One sec and I'll get the link...

Search Amazon "mini pc" - I bought a NiPoGi £209.99

Good luck

yap. gaw ye local cash in a dash
av 3 lappies, linux installed is the
best as man above says, tother on windows
n thats over 10yo, in got a acer chromebook
couple years back, plenty freds on ere, as all
different, linux is the way forwards !!!
opensource bLA BLA,etc etc....
feck 5ton at high st books

That may have been slow to boot up for you if you had too many programs enabled on startup, pressing ctrl, alt, del on your keyboard to bring up task manager, you can disable a lot of the start up apps from there that you don't need, makes the computer run faster when booting up, but yeah, Windows is definitely heavier in general, it has inefficient, heavy background processes and system drivers that can be buggy when updated our just become outdated fairly quickly if not updated at all. It's the actual browsers that consume the most memory and Safari/Chrome are the two worst. I used edge, apparently that's mid range. Ad blockers add to memory loss but can't do without them.

Need an SSD these days, turns on like a TV, so much faster.

You're probably better off with a tower Emit, although I personally prefer All-In-One's (AIO), less wires. I have 2 screens on my work PC and can fully appreciate why you would not want to lose them. Invaluable!

I used my old Dell (AIO) to experiment where I took it apart, cleaned it up inside, got rid of the faulty HD and added a new SSD, before downloading Win 11, all with the help of the kind folk on here, no less. Learned a lot with their help and managed to do it all myself for what was a very small outlay. Surprisingly easier than I expected.

However, I did look up Linux yesterday and rather than gathering dust, I too may start yet again with the Dell on Linux to test it out. Less bloatware and more security conscious... very interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8QQJtXOQEw

Just watched this video regarding Linux and read the interesting comments below. This could certainly liven up your old PC Emit. I also have an old tower XP in the cupboard so I may buy some hardware for it and try to bring this back to life too, but more for extending my building knowledge than for practical purposes. I'm sure a local charity would appreciate it once completed, not forgetting getting the space back.

I also noted that around 4% of private users are on Linux, but around 95% of web-servers use Linux. That tells its own story.

I tried quite a few Linux distros and all had issues despite the great press they get in the tech community...

they are fine if you're very savvy around computers but not great tbh if you aren't..

Chrome OS FLEX is a very reliable if limited option for keeping old kit in life..can be downloaded as with Linux distros..

just be wary of buying pre installed Linux usb's as can contain dubious stuff if not from a reputable seller.

I've been using Brave browser for years. It's a Chromium-based browser (open source) where you have the option to block all adds, trackers, cookies, fingerprinting etc to whatever extent you want. Also has a Tor browser option. Works great and so much quicker than the mainstream options.