UPDATE: After watching my numerous Mac Mini M2 and Lenovo P330 machines return results for MCM (again, that's the only project I do), I am finding that in general (because the WUs donot require exactly the same effort to complete), the Mac Mini M2 is returning about 10 results fewer than the P330. Given that the the P330 machines are returning about 180 WUs each day and therefore 170 for the Macs, that's about a 5-7% difference between the 2 machines.

Therefore, for anyone interested, I will change my above statement to say that the Mac Mini M2 machines are yielding about 90-95% the amount of WUs as the P330. About. So if you're looking for a new machine that uses far less electricity, generates far less noise, generates far less heat, and essentially almost equivalent in MCM Project crunching (which does not use the GPU), I would highly recommend the Mac Mini M2 which is $500 almost anywhere for the base model (which is my model).

@hchc
I kinda thought it must be for learning or experiments. You will then have 3 machine instead of 1. I only checked 7950X because you mentioned "As soon as AMD releases their new Zen 4-based APUs".

I am looking at a 5950x because the motherboard and memory are are already bought and as mentioned above the prices are going down.

@Thunder7
What are you using for cooling on your 7950X. What would you need if left to run at 90 degrees?

Noctua NH-D15 air cooler. I could use (and did test) that also on the standard BIOS settings, where the CPU will increase clock frequency until it hits 90 degrees. If it gets hotter, it will automatically decrease the frequency again. If I remember correctly, at 90 degrees it ran at about 5.2 GHz on all cores. As for the M2, it's no doubt a wonderful machine, but it doesn't run linux.

@ericinboston said:



I just checked, and it's 3 settings to change. (There's a dozen more I have configured to disable other things like Allow Cortana, Allow Telemetry, disable OneDrive, etc) but for this post I'll just focus on Windows Updates.

We'll be using the "Local Group Policy Editor" (Note for those reading, this is only available on Pro/Enterprise/Education editions of Windows, not Home).

1. Start Menu, type "gpedit.msc" -- make sure to type the whole thing and not rely on auto-complete.
2. Select "Run as administrator"
3. You'll see a whole new world opened up with thousands of behind-the-scenes settings.
4. Go to Computer Configuration --> Administrative Templates --> Windows Components --> Windows Update

I've changed 3 of these policies:

A) Configure Automatic Updates
1. Double-click it to open it up, then change it to "Enabled" at the top.
2. At the bottom, I changed "Configure automatic updating:" to "2 - Notify for download and auto-install" so that when Microsoft Patch Tuesday comes (2nd Tuesday of every month after around 11 AM Pacific Time), I can manually check for updates, download, install, and reboot.
3. Make sure to click "OK" to save your changes for that policy.

B) No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations
1. Double-click and Enable this policy and hit OK.

This will prevent your machines from rebooting automatically even after Windows Updates are installed as long as a user is logged in, and if you're running BOINC/WCG not as a service -- especially GPU crunching -- you probably have an account logged in 24/7 anyway.

C) Select the target Feature Update version
1. This is inside the "Windows Update for Business" subfolder.
2. Double-click and change it to "Enabled"
3. There are two text boxes below. I leave the first one blank, but where it says "Target Version for Feature Updates" I have it set to "22H2" For better or worse, Microsoft has said that 22H2 is the last major feature update of Windows 10 until End of Life as they focus on Windows 11 and 12.

That's it! Just double-check that those three policies are "Enabled" then close out of the Local Group Policy Editor. I'm not 100% sure if this requires a reboot to take effect, so maybe do that for fun.

There is a way to automate all this in a script and then push it out to all of your machines, but I'd have to learn how to write that script. Touching each machine like this should only take a few minutes, and heck since they're Windows 10 Pro, you can just Remote Desktop to each machine from your main one.

Hope this helps cut back on the annoyance factor of using Windows.

I'd keep Windows Update still enabled -- it's critical for at least the monthly security patch and any emergency hotfixes, as well as Microsoft Defender updates. Maybe you meant just the auto-reboot?

And yeah, Windows absolutely re-enables a ton of stuff and reverts privacy settings all the time. It's aggravating. Microsoft didn't used to be so blatantly anti-consumer and openly hostile to privacy until the Windows 8 era where they ramped up the 24/7 telemetry and phoning home to Microsoft and 3rd parties, then they backported those telemetry mechanisms to Windows 7, and they've been with us in 10, 11, etc.

Heck, I use Glasswire Elite which is a very pretty upgrade to visualize the Windows Firewall and see what apps are reaching out on the Internet, and anytime I open up a photo, I see "photos.exe" reaching out to Microsoft in Germany or Japan or something. What on earth is it telling them? The fact that I opened a pic? The contents of my family/friends in photos? The hash/checksum of the photo? It's creepy, and I keep blocking it, but it keeps phoning home.

Anyway, there's a ton more Local Security Policies to turn off a lot of that stuff as well. Stuff like Consumer Experience or whatever it's called.

I'll try to work on my Linux crunchbox for beginners guide in early 2024. It really is a breath of fresh air. The hardest part for beginners is knowing the command line and knowing how and what to set up, turn on, or turn off. Documentation and writing a clear guide is just a pain sometimes, but I'll do it.