Hey all. So I decided to end my poorly thought out shelf imposed exile. Mea culpa. Besides, I miss all of your ugly mugs.
And just by coincidence while I was gone a bunch of personal issues that I'd rather not go into popped up and needed resolving. That's done luckily.
And under the category of “I'd rather be ganged raped in a prison shower”......
I just spent 3 miserable days upgrading the media PC from WIN7 to WIN10. It was a wipe WIN7, reformat, clean install of WIN10. But it was anything but “clean”. I had forgotten all the tweaks I had put on this machine over the years and nearly every one of them reared it's head to bite me until the light bulb came on. The first issue involved video. As soon as WIN10 installed the monitor either froze or went blank. But the system was happily running. I had to remove the GeForce GT 610 video card and go back to the GPU VGA to get video to work. Clearly this was not going to be a good solution. And every time I put the GT 610 card in was the same result. Considerable fiddle farting followed and I was just about to dump WIN10 in favor of a Linux solution when that light bulb came on. Long story short....the GT 610 card was trying to render to a monitor that was shut off. The Samsung TV. D'OH.
Once I realized that the video was fixed.
There were several other frustrating issues to work thru including finding the right Realtek HD Audio Monitor Program and drivers but eventually everything fell into place. And now everything is working 100%. And while this machine was snappy running WIN7 I've noticed a considerable speed increase with WIN10. I haven't done any bench marking it's just a seat of pants observation.
I never, EVER, want to do this upgrade again.