The oldest physical box in the house, a 12 years old Core2 Quad in an old case was my Windows 10 box, nutmeg, which I don’t use very much except to test out various things under Windows. I don’t do much with Windows any more, yet it was attached to one of the three monitors on my desk – using up 1\/3 of my total screen real estate; and it was generating heat and fan noise, and its presence offended me. I decided it needed to move to the basement, alongside Cinnamon and Rosemary who are already down there in a rack — banished to the basement because they have a lot of disk drives, and so generate a lot of heat and noise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I bought another rack mount chassis, and moved nutmeg’s innards to it. This proved annoyingly difficult because various old bits of hardware decided this was a good time to give up the ghost – I lost two old disk drives that decided to stop functioning. But eventually got everything up and running. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The idea was that I would manage the box, on the relatively few occasions I needed to do so, just as I do both Cinnamon and Rosemary, with a VNC connection. So after it was up and running on my work table, I pulled the monitor, keyboard and mouse and rebooted. But attempting to connect with VNC failed. For the record, this was TightVNC. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I eventually found that VNC would work if and only if I had a monitor attached. Furthermore, if I had a monitor attached and established a VNC viewer to nutmeg, if I then unplugged the monitor the VNC viewer would immediately freeze. WTF?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without making this a long story, I found that the problem could be resolved by changing an option in Settings\/Accounts\/Sign-in options which is down at the bottom under Privacy, and reads “Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device after an update or restart.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So my mental model of what is going on is that if that option is set, windows is attempting to “set up my device” and I suppose the device it is trying to “set up” must be the monitor. What I don’t exactly get is why the VNC viewer should freeze when an existing monitor is removed. I suppose that removal generates some event internally, and processes attached in some way as consumers must be killed or something. Not sure. I don’t need to understand it. I have very few cycles in my advanced age and am not planning to waste any of them trying to figure out Windows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was very pleased that after I did this, and was able to connect via VNC, I was able to set the resolution to various values up to 4K. And after rebooting and reattaching it even retained my display resolution setting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The oldest physical box in the house, a 12 years old Core2 Quad in an old case was my Windows 10 box, nutmeg, which I don’t use very much except to test out various things under Windows. I don’t do much with Windows any more, yet it was attached to one of the three monitors … Continue reading Headless Windows 10<\/span>