The machine still has the exact audio problem it developed shortly after I switched to Linux Mint a little while back: No matter what I do, the only audio I can get is through headphones attached to one of my 19" monitors (actually televisions). Neither set of TV speakers works.
In order for it to be a problem with the TVs or the HDMI cables, both would have had to have gone bed at exactly the same time.
Since the problem arose right about the time I changed OSes, I figured it was a software problem and tried every solution I could find. But the problem persisting through a change back to the previous OS (where everything used to work fine) seems to narrow it down to a hardware problem (I suppose that there might have been some kind of update to all Ubuntu variants that pranged dual HDMI audio output, but if so I'd have expected that to be quickly fixed, and it obviously hasn't been (I keep my OSes up to date on, sometimes, a daily basis).
I'm not condemning the CyberGeek PC. Its 15-month run was basically problem-free until recently and the price (~$150) was right, especially considering that it probably saved me a kilowatt hour a day in electricity costs versus a regular tower with the same RAM/HD/performance specs.
I got up this morning thinking I'd look for a really good early Black Friday deal on a similar machine, only with 32Gb of RAM and a larger hard drive. I found the latter but not the former, at a really nice price (not an affiliate link).
A 32Gb machine would have cost more than twice as much. If the Amazon AI is correct, this one is not RAM-expandable, but 16Gb has been more than enough for me for a little while and should be for a little while longer. The 500Gb solid state drive is nearly four times the size of my current one, and ...
It comes with Windows pre-installed. I've previously gone with Ubuntu pre-installed machines because I don't like Windows very much, except for one thing: Playing Starcraft.
With that larger SSD, I can assign half the SSD as a partition for Linux and go dual-boot, and I'll still have twice as much hard drive space for Linux as I did before.
The CyberGeek will go back in its box for use as a backup machine in case of emergency, or in case I get into some kind of project that requires its own computer and doesn't require HDMI audio output.
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