I wanted to pop some new life into my DIY Windows 11 NAS/home server, so I tore back into that old Ryzen box and made it relevant again. It was one of those “what a day” upgrades too—I managed to butterfinger a donated Ryzen 7 1700X and damaged pins when the CPU lifted out of the socket while I was fighting the cooler. Luckily I dug through my parts stash and dropped in a Ryzen 5 3600, and honestly it’s a newer, better chip anyway. From there I focused on what a Windows NAS can do with off-the-shelf parts: Storage Spaces drive pooling, simple Windows shares, and then adding a GPU for real-world improvements. With a GTX 1660 6GB in the server, I fixed the herky-jerky Jellyfin playback by enabling NVIDIA NVENC hardware acceleration, and Plex benefits too. Then I took it a step further and ran LM Studio over RDP to do local AI inference—private, in-house, no cloud—getting around 25 tokens/sec on a small model, which is pretty wild for a “couple generations old” box. Finally, I showed how I run Docker on a Windows NAS without Docker Desktop: Hyper-V + a Debian 12 VM, then install Docker and Portainer so I’ve got a GUI to manage containers. End result: one machine doing files, media, AI, and containers—because if you bought the horsepower, you might as well use it.