Finally A New PC On My Desk

A couple of weeks before we moved last November, my trusted Mac Book Pro died. I took it to an Apple computer shop that was certified to do repairs, but they only confirmed what I already suspected; the motherboard was toast and replacing it wasn't worth it. In December of 2019, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 so that I'd have a simple computer to do basic things online. I ran Raspian for several months and in the summer I installed Ubuntu Mate. In June of 2020, Chuwi launched an Indiegogo campaign for a tiny Windows 10 mini PC; the Larkbox.

For the last ten or so years, I've always been on a Mac Book Pro. I bought one for myself in California in 2008 and afterward always inherited my wife's Mac Book Pro. As a graphic designer, she always got a new system every couple of years. Before that, I worked on Macs at my job and owned Gateway PCs for personal use. These were towers with room for several hard drives, CD-ROM drive, Zip drive, and even a 3 1/2" floppy; monsters that had to be hidden under the desk.

While I still want a Mac Book, the Chuwi Larkox was the ideal unit to be able to do a bit more than on the Raspberry Pi. As often with crowd-funding campaigns, the Larkbox arrived a little behind schedule. It was a month late, so absolutely nothing to be mad about. On September 24th, the unit sat in my mail box. I had upgraded my campaign contribution to get the Larkbox with an additional 240GB M.2 SSD. Windows 10 Home Edition came pre-installed.

I've been using this tiny unit for a month now, and I'm very pleased with it. Chuwi didn't pre-install the latest Windows 10; it was running version 1909 and for a while, Windows Update indicated that the hardware was incompatible for 2004. As various people on the Chuwi forum reported running into problems trying to update, I decided to wait. I ordered a 4 port Icy Box USB hub to be able to connect an external hard-drive so that I could do a full system backup. The hub was out of stock and before it shipped, Microsoft released the 20H2 Windows 10 update.

Today, a slim Lindy HDMI cable and the IcyBox USB hub finally arrived allowing me to create a recovery disk and then to go ahead to apply the 20H2 update using Microsoft's Update Assistant. Everything went without a single hiccup so I'm able to stay busy on offtrail.guru.