... In which I solve problems no one else could possibly care about

I just got back "my" ASUS CM1855 that was sitting in storage for a couple of years. I had set it up as a gaming computer and it got replaced for gaming with a more modern Alienware system. Whereupon, the ASUS went to storage 1200 miles away from me and was not worth the cost of retrieving. Meantime, it got "older and more useless." Till I happened to stop by for other reasons.

Other than (a) lots of annoying fan noise; and (b) terrifyingly slow loading, it still worked fine.  Moreover,  I noticed that once software "loaded", programs ran pretty fast.

Since I wouldn't be using it for gaming, there was no reason for it to be running hot. I developed a plan: change settings/reduce background software to reduce heat & fan noise. Move Windows to SSD.

I had no idea if these things would work.

Initial Update

top CM1855 came with Windows 7, I think. I did update it to Windows 10. I also had set it up to dual boot openSUSE Linux. This was my first UEFI rodeo, so I had set the BIOS to compatibility mode. However, at some point I removed openSUSE to free up the drive space

• I changed BIOS settings back to what I think are the default settings.
• I updated to Windows 11 using the Microsoft update tool. I don't know whether there was a "compatibility" issue -- it may be that CM1855 does not have a TPM module. In any event, my specialized update tool is one that overides the "Windows 11 ready" checks. Yes, it is out there. (Since I do things in a hurry and try to reconstruct what I did after the fact, sorry, I don't have a link.)
• I removed a lot of the "startup" apps: There are very few things I want running until actually needed.
• I used various lists to determine what services I could disable and/or set to manual. There's a bunch I don't want that Microsoft thinks I need. Nope, don't need them. I don't even want "search" to run.
  

And, so, virtually no fan noise. Noise problem solved..

Moving to NVME M2 SSD

top Running Taskmanager, it was obvious that Windows 11 was using vast amounts of RAM and engaging in a lot of disk activity. My best efforts to disable unused services, etc. had very little impact on the amount of RAM seemingly used by default. So, launching an app (say Brave Browser) would be slow and tedious. But, thereafter, it would run fine. Why was it so much ridiculouslyi slower than my much lower powered Lenovo Yoga2 Pros from the same era.

Apparently, the difference was that the Yoga2 Pros run from SSD. What would happen if I moved Windows to SSD? Could I move Windows to SSD? (Spoiler alert: SSD based CM1855 runs fantastic!)

• Hard Drive replacement vs. NVME.  Research pointed to NVME PCIE M2 SSD if I could make it work. Info is not readily available. The "big" PCIE slot in the CM855 is taken up by the NVIDIA 950 video card I have installed.
• How to install NVME? Next to the big PCIE slot is a short "4x" PCIE slot. Would this work? I bought an M2>PCIE adapter that would work for 16x 8x or 4x and installed it in the 4x slot. Computer did not crash. I purchased a 500 gb M2 SSD. All went according to plan. CM1855 now had a 50gb SSD available.
  

Cloning Windows to the SSD

top I used the free version of Disk Genius to completely clone my Windows 11 onto the new SSD. Before doing so, I did a lot of Windows cleanup, such as removing obsolete and unused software, running BleachBit.

This had no issues, I now had a complete version of Windows 11 on the SSD. Not, however, that it could do anything. (Licensing is not a problem, as the computer's license is tied to the motherboard, not the drive or the installed Windows software. (I was also prepared/willing to use the "developer mode" free license that has reduced functionality, if necessary.

Booting the SSD

top Apparently, the CM1855 bios cannot boot the SSD, even though it can be "seen" by the operating system(s). There are some available efi boot systems that can load the necessary driver(s) and offer a menu of available bootable OSes -- eg, Windows/Linux/AppleOS. Conceptually, a bootable USB drive is created, CM1855 bios boots the USB drive, and the boot system scans the available drives (including SSD) for bootable OSes. But, the USB drive can only scan the drives/partitions for which it has drivers installed.

I tried 3 systems (although they seem to be branches of the same original Clover). I located and tried Clover -- it didn't work for me. I located and tried a branch of Clover called rEFInd. It also did not work for me, even though I thought I correctly added the NVME driver to the system. The rEFInd USB drive was complicated by the image writer creating a USB drive that didn't itself "mount" and allow editing. I liked the boot GUI, though.

I finally found DUET "DUET_EDK2020_REFIND.zip", if you are searching for it. DUET seems to be a wrapper for rEFInd and the GUI boot manager that launches is actually a customized version of rEFInd. Rather than using an ISO image writer, DUET includes its own utilities to format the USB drive and make it bootable.

The first difference I found was that I could easily mount and access the USB drive after it was formatted and set up by DUET. Secondly, following what were essentially the same instructions for rEFInd, I was able to obtain the NVME driver and put it in the correct directory so that when DUET boots, it correctly locates the OSes on the SSD (as well as those on the original hard drive). Explained as follows: "Copy the NvmExpressDxe.efi and NvmExpressDxe-64.efi files to the EFI\Boot\drivers folder on the DUET USB drive. " I had to search for NvmExpressDxe.efi files, I don't think they were included with the DUET installer.

It is also easy to edit the refind config file to change which of the OSes DUET finds will auto-boot.  Since I often access the computer remotely, I would like it to restart the correct OS on those occasions it reboots (power loss/windows update/etc.)

When Windows on the SSD boots, drive letters are swapped, so that Windows is in fact c:/ and the original hard drive mounts as d:/. Whereas, if the Windows on the hard drive is selected to boot, then the hard drive mounts as c:/ and the SSD mounts as d:/ (I had initially assumed I would have to somehow make the drive assignments and install the SSD Windows on "drive D", but this never became an issue.