Preface Maybe you get old and start getting nostalgic. Lately everything new feels boring to me, and I’ve been missing the past. So I got the urge to build an “old computer” — install Win98, WinXP, or even Windows 7 on something. The Win9X and XP eras seemed like a hassle, so I decided to start with Win7. The other reason I went with Win7 is that I spotted a batch of cheap new-old-stock laptops on eBay: the Dell Latitude 3340, the first generation, the Haswell one. Stock config is 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD, and the key point is “brand new old stock” — compared with those ThinkPads that have been flipped who-knows-how-many times, that’s one advantage. After some research I found this thing drives Windows 7 perfectly. Even the weird Intel integrated HD4600 can utterly demolish retro games from the Windows 7 era, so it’s a solid choice for revisiting stuff from around 2010. With that beautiful fantasy in mind, I bought this new-old-stock machine.

Everyone knows my main machine used to be an X1 Carbon 2017. Unfortunately, I lost it earlier this year. After that, my wife was actually on board with me buying a new one, but the X1 Carbon 2021 was about to launch and the rumors said it was a big upgrade — new 16:10 screen, better GPU and CPU performance. So I decided to wait. But while waiting, I still needed a laptop to get work done. So I started looking: Performance has to be passable Keyboard has to at least be usable Screen at least 1080p, color gamut can’t be terrible Strong battery life Build quality as good as possible

Bought a Dell P2715Q monitor during JD’s 618 sale. This thing only has DP and HDMI. With my current setup, HDMI caps out at 4K 30 Hz, and 30 Hz is basically unusable, so a DP cable was mandatory. I had some UGREEN DP cables lying around from a previous JD order, so I plugged one in. Big mistake. The moment I connected it, the PC wouldn’t turn on. At first I thought the monitor was faulty, or that my GPU (an iChill 770 4G) couldn’t handle 4K. Then I tried a hot-plug and it worked fine, no problem at all. But once the cable was connected, the machine refused to shut down properly, and after shutting down it wouldn’t boot again. After a bunch of testing, I figured out that with this DP cable, the PC just won’t boot. And when it does come back, Gigabyte’s “Dual BIOS recovery” message pops up telling me one BIOS is dead and it restored from the backup.