My computer died last week. Not a surprise — it has been acting wonky for a few months now, like it would lose any sense of when it was. Finally, Wednesday evening, it pined for the fjords and, while it would power up, nothing happened. The lights would come on, the fan would kick in, but the motherboard wasn’t sending a signal to the monitor, and the hard drive didn’t fire up.
I’m writing this from a new computer. Well, not really new. It’s a refurbished Dell Optiplex I bought a year and a half ago, not long after the pandemic sent the world home to work. My intention was to use it as my work-from-home computer, but it had two issues. One, it wouldn’t always start (which turned out to be a problem with the memory chips, which weren’t seated in the sockets correctly). Two, it won’t stay connected to the Remote Desktop for more than a few minutes. I still haven’t figured that one out.
Anyway, it’s set up now, and I also turned it into a triple boot monster — Windows 10, Manjaro Linux, and Linux Mint. Why? Because I could! I had a bunch of parts, so I used them — installed another hard drive, salvaged the hard drive out of my old machine and hooked it up as an external drive, etc. Why not? Why not, indeed. It’s working pretty snazzy now, though I had some difficulty in getting the three operating systems to play nice.
I’m going to have to sort out that problem with the Remote Desktop, though. If I can’t work remotely with this, that’s going to be a problem.
I’ll also check with IT at work tomorrow to see if the VPN can be accessed with PPTP or OpenVPN. If so, I can connect with the Linux installs. There’s a Linux client for SSTP, but I haven’t figured out yet how to get that to work.