gofar99 Messages: 1949 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi, It never occurred to me that you could fry a PC via the USB ports. I cooked two of the scope interfaces but not the PC in past. Annoying but not very costly. Then I cooked the third one and it decided that my then Alienware needed to be sent to heaven. That was not funny. It took a new main board and power supply to straighten that out. It is now a Supermicro server type PC. It was not the disaster it could have been as the PC was getting long in tooth and I need one to use with my main stereo. It did provide the opportunity to convince the spouse that a new PC was in order. Thus the HP OMEN I am using now. A really capable machine (8 core I7, 32 gig, 2X 1TB SSD, Gforce RTX 3500) With care it ought to last a few years. Now for a second positive result. The $90 mini PC turned out to be slower and less capable than the one that got fried. I ordered a refurbished HP G800 mini from Amazon for $110. An I5 4 core, 16 gig with 500 g SSD with WIN 10 pro (new load). It is really a very capable device. I have gotten refurbished PCs before and if you are careful about the source they are fine. The only thing that was a possible negative was that it has display port outputs (2). A $6 adapter to HDMI and all is well. It would be a fine PC for nearly any sort of use except gaming. Now the question is what to do with the slow mini running WIN10Pro? I suppose I could imbed it in an audio preamp ....but why?