ASUS Essentio CM6870 Desktop

I finally found a nice, affordable windows 10 computer to replace my old Pentium 4 XP desktop. The new PC is an Asus Essentio CM6870 with an i5-3450 processor, 12 GB RAM, 500 GB HD, and an Nvidia GeForce GT 520 graphics card. This is a 9 year old PC that is replacing an 18 year old PC. The price for this CM6870 in 2021 was $125 including tax and shipping. I remember spending around $2400 for my first PC back in 1985. You can still spend that much, and more, for a PC with the latest hardware. 

But, since I no longer play the newer PC games, this one will be plenty fast for my needs. The PC came with windows 10 Home edition installed. A new copy of windows 10 Home goes for around $40, so I think I got a fair deal. My only concern is that right after I bought the PC, Microsoft announced that Windows 11 would not support PC's without a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). This is a hardware security feature that was added to computer motherboards starting in 2011. The latest version TPM 2.0 was released in October 2014. So, basically Microsoft will not allow computers that are over 6 years old to run windows 11. Some people have already found a way to install Win11 on older PC's, but it requires replacing some of the installation files prior to running the install. As you can imagine this is not sitting well with people who have older machines. Microsoft announced that they are ending support for Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025. Windows 10 was first released on July 29, 2015. I expect Microsoft will have to support windows 10 for an extended period of time to prevent millions of computers from becoming e-waste.

There are several upgrades I could make to this PC. But with Microsoft not supporting older hardware, it doesn't make sense to put any money into this one. I don't feel any more secure, because hackers have had a lot of time to develop methods to bypass windows 10 security. At least I'm using an operating system that gets regular updates (for now). This isn't my first experience with window 10. We also have a 6 year old Asus M32 desktop with an i3-4160 processor. Even though the i5-3450 is two years older than the i3-4160, it is a bit faster because it has 4 cores vs. 2 cores and 6MB SmartCache vs. 3MB SmartCache. The Nvidia graphics card in the Asus Essentio seems to help render web pages better in Microsoft Edge than the on-board Intel graphics we are using on the Asus M32. I don't have to reload web pages several times before they display and function properly. A lot of websites no longer work with window XP. Blogger.com is one of them.