So while I’m in Japan, I bought this tiny and borderline useless Fujitsu Esprimo B532, powered by an i5, and not very much else. I upped it to 8GB of RAM, and put in a SSD and upgraded to Windows 10 to make it slightly tolerable.
The i5-3470T is ancient! And so old that newer versions of VMware and Hyper-V won’t run on it. The old solution was simply to use an older version of VMware. In my case the highest version that’ll run is 12.5.9, however when trying to launch it I got this fun message:
Well wasn’t that a big bust.
I guess there is something hidden somewhere, but I just renamed the executable, and set it to Windows 8.0 compatibility mode, and wow it works!
And there we go! Now the latest version of NT can run the first public pre-release of Windows NT. YAY.
Okay, I’ll bite – why?
First, didn’t you just buy a couple Ivy Bridge era Xeons (https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2019/02/06/huananzhi-x79/)? My main desktop is an Ivy Bridge too – I wouldn’t think of them as ancient, because newer CPUs are still only marginally faster and have very few interesting extensions.
But what I’m confused about is the ark page indicates this chip has EPT which AFAIK is what Microsoft calls SLAT which is the thing Windows clients want in order to run Hyper-V. So what requirement does current VMware have that this processor doesn’t support?
The apartment Im renting only has a single 1500 watt breaker for the entire place! Using a hair dryer Ive already managed to trip the thing.
I’m not sure what is missing CPU wise exactly but it wasn’t happy on this old thing.
Beyond the insane low power here the only thing worse is the keyboards here with the incredibly tiny space bars… and weird layouts. At least it’s not AZERTY!
It’s probably a BIOS issue. If it’s possible an update might help. I only have experience with standard SFF size european versions of these esprimos. In those VT can be enabled somewhere in the setup.
I thought it may be a bios thing too, but couldn’t find anything.
It’s an okay tiny machine, but now I have the desire to play something and the lack of PCI express is kind of a shame.
I may have found it on the Japanese Fujitsu support page.
There are two versions of these machines there B532/F and a /G.
http://www.fmworld.net/biz/fmv/support/download/index_desktop.html
I just get some weird error about not having a BIOS driver or something weird.
I’m thinking of buying some older i7 getting a new GPU and maxing ram or something. This machine is a glorified laptop, and it’s starting to drive me crazy..
At least your main is Ivy Bridge.
I’m using a Nehalem based Laptop as my everyday PC (Latitude E6410) xD.
I passed by a store last night that had a bucket of Xeon 2011’s for 500 yen each.
Kind of strange to be in the situation where the cost of the processor isn’t the issue!
That’d make a lovely Mac mini-esque Hackintosh with a 3770T in it.