Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Putting this here: Shuttle XPC Glamor Series SN68SG2 and Windows 10

I have a Shuttle XPC Glamor Series SN68SG2 that I've had for years. I originally built it in 2008 as a Windows Home Server box. 

As time has gone on, I turned into a workstation for mundane tasks, such as running the weather station interface software, or USB-to-Serial cables for programming the scanner, ham and GMRS radios.

This went from Windows Home Server to Windows 7 to Windows 10 with the free upgrade. Since the upgrade to Windows 10, I've had issues with the Start Menu and Cortana. I tried a number of fixes, but nothing really worked. I even went so far as reloading the system with a fresh copy of Windows 10.

I had just been resigned to getting the weather station software fired up and running and then not interacting with it until I needed to restart the software and computer.

Turns out I think it's been a video driver related problem all along. I installed an older, alternative video card and the start menu is magically working again. I used an ATI Radeon X1300/X1550 PCIe video card that had two SVGA cables when it was on Windows 7 and it worked well. This video card doesn't have any valid or supported Windows 10 drivers...but since Windows 10 knows that, it kicked the video driver back to the generic, lower resolution driver.

Start menu works like a champ so far and its been a couple days, which is a couple days longer than it had been working before.

Given all that, I'll be on the hunt for a cheap and/or free low profile PCIe video card for this machine.

Good luck!
Chris