Been using Win10 at work for a while, but finally got around to building a new system for personal use. This one's a Shuttle XPC (SH67R3) with an i7-3770K CPU, 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. A PCIE 4-port serial card plus the onboard header and rear-panel I/O gives me 5 standard COM ports plus a lot of USB connectivity.

A Blu-Ray player/DVD burner and a multi-card reader (which also accepts SSDs) round out the peripheral complement. The motherboard has a mini-PCIE slot which I thought would accommodate an SSD, but the BIOS only supports a WiFi adapter. That's next on the list. I don't plan on using this system for gaming so the onboard video is more than adequate in terms of performance.

Some of my older scanner-control and packet radio software (ScanCat Gold and XP-Win, for example) will only run on Win98 or 32-bit Windows XP (in Compatibility mode). I'd built VMs of these systems previously, but the hosts I was running them on were slowed way down if one was spun up.

As I'm typing this, I have two XP VMs (2GB RAM/ea) up and running with almost no CPU loading.

My next build will be centered on another Shuttle - this time, an SH170R6. Plans are to use an i7-7700K, 64GB RAM and the mini-PCIE drive I'd bought for this system. Peripherals will be the same as my SH67. Also going to add a 2TB SSD to each system as an image partition for backup purposes, though the second system will get 2X 2TB in a Raid0 configuration. I'll use the new system as the primary and this one will be parked at the other end of the operating position.

A number of my HF receivers, VHF/UHF receivers and scanners are controllable by PC and some are only supported by ScanCat Gold. These will be managed via the VMs, while anything else that can run in Win10 native (such as FreeScan or ScanCat-Lite) will be installed on the host OS. VirtualBox 6.1.2 manages the VMs.

Topping it all all is a shelf I'm building over my operating position. That will support a pair of Westinghouse 32" LED TVs (a third is the second PC's primary monitor and my main TV). These monitors have a number of inputs including composite, VGA and multiple HDMI. When installed and connected to the PCs they'll serve as status and operational displays for the radio control programs as well as watching the occasional video disk.

The version of Win10 I'm using is Pro, and I'm pretty impressed with the speed so far.