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So, a used Lenovo ThinkCentre was brought into the house. No operating system, no video card. The machine is a small form factor, there's not much room in there to do anything. First order of business, install a video card - except, my choices are a GT 730 which is ancient, or a RTX 1650, which is a couple millimeters too long to fit. Yeah, it's low profile, it fits fine that way, but the hard drive mount folds down on top of the end of the card. Bleahhhh! I diddle around for a couple hours, finally decide I'm going to modify that fold-down thing. Get out a pair of cutters, and start snipping - finally, I have the card mounted.

Power up - I only get the left half of the screen. It's hard to install any operating system, if you can't see anything. Even a text install would be difficult! I boot into every operating system on my Ventoy USB stick, with the same results.

I guess something is wrong with the video card? I stick the other 1650 in there. No joy. Try the 730 just to be sure. Same thing.

Scroll through the BIOS setup a dozen times or more, changing settings, and it's STILL the same! I put a 1650 back in there, then I go into the monitor's settings, searching for something to adjust so I can see the entire screen. Even in BIOS setup, I can't see all of the screen. Weird!

After nearing exhaustion, searching for that magic setting, I go back into BIOS one more time. Scroll, scroll, scroll, oh - what's THIS? "Force specific OS settings for compatibility" or words to that effect. I turn it off, save, and reboot. AWESOME!! I get the whole screen now! Or, very nearly so. There seem to be a couple pixels missing on all four sides. Screw it, I'm installing Windows, I can search for those pixels later.

Win 11 Pro, local install, local logon, no attachment to any online accounts anywhere. Microsoft has sure screwed things up by insisting on a cloud logon to a local machine!!

Windows installed, update, update, update, update some more. Did I mention that I've used a custom install media? There is no Edge browser. No Cortana. A bunch of stuff was carved out before I ever stuck the USB in the drive. Install Nvidia driver, install Firefox, install Iridium browser, install Folding@Home, install Qbittorrent because I KNOW they're going to be torrenting, then install the VPN to avoid copyright trolls.

Everything is looking pretty good, except those missing pixels. I call up Nvidia control center, try one setting after another, with no luck. Ahhh, what's this? "Help". I click on it. YAY! Nvidia's help menu tells me to go into the monitor settings, and search for anything like "overscan". Yep, there it is. Turn off that overscan, and now I can see all those missing pixels.

What should have taken an hour or two, turned into about 10 hours of messing around. I mostly blame Lenovo. WTF, optimized OS defaults? Really? They don't work, not even for the OS that was apparently targeted by those defaults!!

And, why, oh why, did they make that case just about 3 mm too small for a more-or-less standard sized low profile video card? Nothing worthwhile is going to fit in there, without modification!

I'll share a bit of the blame. I probably should have caught that optimized defaults much sooner, and turned it off. But, I was tired when I started, then worked into the wee hours of the night trying to finish up.

Maybe I learned something from my mistakes. Like, don't start a project late in the day.

Then again, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I'll probably do things the same way next time!

Oh yeah. Folding at home? That Ryzen 7 promises to crank out ~85k points per day. And, the 1650 is showing ~450k. Production should pick up over the next few days! I'll take another 1/2 million PPD, give or take a little.