I've needed a new PC for a very long time now, and putting one together was a task I first started to tackle back in late 2020. However, the absolute shitshow that was the worldwide GPU shortage kicked my "new PC dreams" right in the balls, leading to me eventually settling for a new laptop in mid 2021. However, I'm not a fan of having to keep setting up the laptop whenever I want to use Windows 10 (correction: need to use Windows 10. I will never want to use Windows 10), and the fans are so loud I'm sure the damn thing was a helicopter in a previous life.
As I'd already bought several components ready for a new build back in 2020, including an SSD, wireless network card, optical drive, and some super quiet case fans, I figured it was about time I put together a new machine after all. Little did I know what I was getting myself in for.
The rest of this blog entry recounts the oh so wonderful journey I have been on these last few months, trying to get this damn machine working in the exact way I want it to. Because it is so long, boring and pointless, it is hidden by default. But if for some weird reason you wish to read about it, click the button below.
The Plan
I can't deny it. I hate change. Therefore I'm never a fan when I have no choice but to start using a newer version of Windows. Because of this, I'm always a very late adopter to new software. Sometimes, like what happened with Windows XP and Windows 7, I mostly get used to the OS, and manage to get it set up and configured to work exactly how I want it to. In fact, after settling into Windows 7 usage, the only problem I've had with it for the past decade is that I've had to use Themes/Aero in order for the OS to have vsync capability, whereas I would much prefer the classic look. Oh well.
Windows 8 was something I was never going to entertain, with its shitty mobile/app/touchscreen feel and appearance. And when Windows 10 came out I heard all the horror stories about its telemetry and tracking, and staunchly decided I would never use that either. So I scrunched my eyes up closed, stuck my fingers in my ears, and hoped they went away, to be replaced by something better.
But then the next thing was Windows 11. And as I am both a more traditional PC user, and someone who hates their software being infested with bloatware and telemetry, Windows 11 is simply something I am never going to touch.
But this left me with a conundrum. With more and more games needing Windows 10 minimum, it was quite clear that I would need a PC with a more up to date OS at some point, and relying on my laptop wasn't going to cut it. So I had the bright idea to put together a new computer that would be dual boot Windows 7 and Windows 10. That way, I could use 7 for comfort in my everyday tasks, and switch to 10 quickly and easily when needed for newer things.
Luckily I had anticipated this. Shortly after Win 10 was released, and Windows 7 looked like it was soon to vanish, I had snapped up another Win 7 Pro code, just to keep in my pocket for a possible future build, if newer versions of Windows were not pleasing to my sensitive palate.
I assumed the build would have happened far sooner than this. But finally, come August 2022, the time had arrived at last...
The Components
I didn't need anything super beefy, which was good, because I certainly couldn't afford it. Near the end of 2020, when I first started looking at putting a machine together, the card I wanted, the 3060 Ti, was about to come out. I don't think it ever saw its RRP of £300-£400, as the GPU shortage kicked in proper. If you could find this card at all over the next 18 months, its price easily pushed twice the RRP. Even now, months after I bought the components I did, it's still going for £450-£500. As it was, I had to settle for a 2060, at around £300. Not as much grunt as I would have wanted, but still a marked improvement over the 970 I'd been using since 2015.
Other concessions had to be made to fit my budget, with the Ryzen 5 5500 CPU, and a motherboard that still had a PS2 port, for Windows 7 installation reasons. The biggest headache was finding a tower that fit my dimensional and budgetary requirements. Seriously, out of all the parts, it was the price increase on cases that surprised me the most. I had to settle for one of the cheapest I could find, which was easily in the price range of some of the fancier, more expensive ones from 6 or 7 years ago when I'd last had to buy one. Absolutely shocking increases here.
I made what I thought was a big error here, but it quickly turned out to not be that much of an issue. In my struggle to find a cheap but decent case, I'd bought one that did not have an optical drive bay. I know not many people use optical drives any more, but I'd got my old Windows 7 installation disc, and old games still on CDs and DVDs that I'd got to get around to at some point. It also meant that the new drive I'd picked up back in 2020 would no longer have a home. Oh well.
My main win was getting to use a modular PSU for the first time. This thing was not cheap at all, but it was awesome to only have to install the cables I needed.
It's easier to be tidy inside computer towers these days
The Initial Attempt
As it was the Windows 7 installation that was the most important to me, this was the one I started with first. However, upon trying to use my old installation disc, in a drive hanging out of the side of the tower, I found the disc would not boot. It simply kept freezing every time the Windows logo appeared. Now I knew Windows 7 could be problematic to install on newer hardware, mostly for its lack of USB3 drivers (which was why I'd bought the old style PS2 mouse and motherboard), but this was something new. I instead went ahead with the Windows 10 installation which went off without a hitch, before rolling my sleeves up and getting stuck in to some forums.
It turns out, Windows 7 software calls upon some kind of VGA emulator to display the logo when the OS is booting. Of course, on a lot of new hardware, this old VGA emulator no longer exists, which is why the crashes happen once any graphics appear.
I thought I'd found the answer when I came upon something called the SiMPLiX tool. This thing claims to make Windows 7 bootable on new hardware by combining the Windows 7 software with the software that boots Windows 10. To use the tool I just had to drop in isos of both versions of Windows from the same region and the tool would do the rest. Or so I thought. To make it work, an iso of Windows 7 Ultimate is required. I followed the provided link to download the UK version, and tried the tool.
However, no matter what I tried, the bootable iso would complain about the license files being wrong, or missing, or something. After just booting straight from the Ultimate iso, I saw the following image:
Hmm. That does not look like English.
This made me realise the UK version of Win 7 Ultimate was not the UK version at all, but the Ukraine version. My stupid brain had been befuddled by the fact that there are separate UK and USA versions of Windows 10, and I thought it would be the same for previous Windows. After thumping my stupid head against the nearest wall, I downloaded the English Win 7, which contains all English regions. However, using this iso gave me exactly the same issues, and it just kept blabbering on about the license files.
This was obviously not going to work. I knew I instead had to make the old Win 7 iso boot on its own.
Luckily, the problem with the crashing graphics was not unknown to the community, who had created a patched acpi.sys which was the problem file. But to use it, I'd got to figure out how to slipstream it into a new iso. This lead to me installing something called the Automated Installation Kit for the first time, and learning how to mount and edit wim files, which are basically just huge archives that are unpacked to the hard drive when Windows installs.
I made two further errors here. As the SiMPLiX tool added in all of the Windows updates, and it could make legacy Windows 7 boot media without combining it with any Windows 10 software, I decided to continue using it. I figured it would save time than having to download all those updates from within a clean Windows 7 install at a later date. This ended up costing me a far greater amount of time, which I will get to later.
My second error was that, after mucking around with the AIK and all those wim files, the SiMPLiX tool could do all that for me automatically. So I'd wasted a lot more time here also.
But whatever. I'd got a bootable iso, and Windows 7 was installed, drivers added in, and a backup image was made.
However, I didn't get around to using the new machine for weeks. This was because I still had to re-install all my programs, copy over all my files (which were in a right state and needed sorting out), and generally set up the machine to how I wanted it to work.
The Big Problem Revealed
It wasn't until early November that I actually made the decision to start using the computer. I unplugged and sorted out the mass of cables under my desk, removed the old computer, and put the new one in its place. When I booted it, the damn thing froze. Not great, but upon restarting, it loaded up alright. I narrowed my eyes at it, sceptically.
As I installed things, I had to restart several times. More often than not, it would freeze while booting. As you can guess, this made me rather unhappy. Like before, the freezes were happening while on the logo screen, but much later than before, seemingly just as the Windows desktop was about to appear.
However, I did not have the time for troubleshooting, so the old computer got subbed back in, and the new one shoved up the corner until I could get back to it.
It wasn't until my two week Christmas break that I got around to looking at it again. The weeks since my last dance with this devilish machine had given me chance to plan my attack. Yes, maybe I should have been spending time with friends and family, but this damn thing was going to work whether it liked it or not.
As I had installed community-made drivers when I had originally got the computer up and running, I was pretty sure it was one of these that was causing the issues. Why the hell it was only freezing roughly two thirds of the time, I did not know. That is something that is still true to this day. And it's not the only thing that still baffles me.
To assist me in my endeavour, I ripped out the hard drive from my old laptop to use a test subject. As proved to be true, I was expecting the drive to take a bit of a hammering over the next few days, and didn't want to wear out my new SSD.
On this drive, I installed clean Windows 7 from the SiMPLiX iso. As I thought, even after 20-25 restarts, shutdowns, and full power offs, Windows had no trouble booting. Not a single freeze.
So I commenced with the driver installations. I'd got a couple of different community made driver packages, as well as the official drivers for the X470 chipset, which apparently do work on the X570 that is on my motherboard. It would of course be more helpful if there were official Win 7 drivers for my chipset, but whatever.
My fears came true, as whenever I installed any single driver, upon a restart, the freezes would happen again. It didn't seem to matter which drivers, or in what order. Seemingly endless times, I clean re-installed, then tried a different driver or driver combo. I even skipped the chipset driver and went straight to the GPU driver, but the same thing happened. I was vexed.
The Breakthrough
I was on my sixth day of troubleshooting when I finally discovered the issue. I'd been trawling through several different forums, when a single sentence, in a post about something completely different, caught my eye. It stated that the USB3 drivers installed by the SiMPLiX tool could freeze some ASUS motherboards. Now I didn't know what drivers they were talking about, as I had removed all of the drivers from the tool's folders before creating the new iso, so it wouldn't have had any to slipstream in. After all, I wanted a clean, driver-less install to run my troubleshooting.
I doubted this had anything to do with my problem. But I thought it best to check. Lucky I did, because as usual, I was proven very wrong.
I dived into the scripts that controlled the tool, and saw that any USB3 drivers placed into the tool's folder structure were only slipstreamed into the boot.wim file anyway, not the install.wim file. These drivers, slipstreamed into the boot.wim file, would only be used when booting from the installation iso, so you could use the keyboard and mouse when setting up Windows. But they would not be copied into the Windows installation itself.
So what USB3 drivers were they talking about?
Turns out, the SiMPLiX tool sneakily adds some generic USB3 drivers that had been ported from Windows 8. However, the point at which it sneaks all these in is when it's slipstreaming the Windows updates, and not when it's slipstreaming the other drivers.
So it seems that, all along, I had got drivers in my installation that were not only unsupported by my hardware, but were also causing the irregular freezing. The thing that still boggles my brain is how the computer never froze when no other drivers were installed. I mean, the bad USB3 drivers were still there doing their thing in the background, but I'd only get problems once other drivers were added into the mix. I sighed in frustration, but at least I had a lead to go on.
It seemed I needed to make a new iso and start all over again, but a check through the tool's folders left me scratching my head as to where the unwanted USB3 drivers could be. As I could not find them, more forum searching was required. Turns out, there's a single line of code, in over a thousand lines of code, that needed a simple /NoUSB switch adding to the end of it.
How the fuck was I supposed to know that?
Success
Finally, I had a clean install with absolutely no unwanted drivers. I restarted a few times. There were no freezes. I gingerly started to install drivers, one at a time, and restarting after each one. There were no freezes. I installed some programs. There were no freezes.
It had worked, it seemed. I had done it. The computer was working. COOL22 was finally behaving.
It was finally acting, well, cool.
There was much rejoicing. Well, at least until I remembered I'd got to do that all over again, in order to install it onto the SSD.
I sighed, and glumly got back to it.
