Wow, that went smoothly.

A few years ago I built a machine for a friend, bartering for some landscape work. He called me up the other day, and said it died in the middle of a movie. He lucked out that it was the motherboard that died and not the video card. This was one of those emergency situations where he just wanted to to get up and running as soon as possible, and didn’t want to wait for a used board off ebay (and a used motherboard probably wasn’t the best investment anyways), so I replaced the i5-7600 with a Ryzen 5600x. I swapped the motherboard and cpu, and Windows booted up and everything worked out of the box on the first try. I was thanking the Lord that the video card, memory, and PSU were all good.

It’s a refreshing change from the days of having to rebuild Windows with a hardware swap.