Newbie Help. Intell i5 Touchscreen desktop project

Hi everyone, I’m new to the community. I just bought some First alert z wave plus smoke and CO2 alarms and plan to go crazy one thing at a time. Security, cameras, automation the works. For a Hub I’m undecided. I would love to stay budget. I have an Intell i5 HP envy 23’’ touchscreen all in one desktop running windows 10 on a old spun hd. It has a cracked up edge on the black border around the viewable area. My crazy idea is to mount it in the wall hiding the cracked border. Probably should get a ssd and ditch the old drive but I would probably lose windows or just save that drive if I want to revert back. Having the huge touch display would be kinda cool but will this work with HA OS installed fresh on a ssd with this hardware? Should I try to run it on windows with the crappy HDD? or should I use Ubuntu something else? And will any of these keep the touchscreen enabled? Do I need add on components to run the Zwave stuff etc. It has wifi ,Bluetooth and ethernet. Is this to far fetched of a project? I haven’t found anyone convert an all-in-one like this looking for any advice I can get. Thank you.

Hi @jlanier3300, welcome to the forum.

This is just my opinion.
It’s not far fetched; I run a 7" touchscreen with a RPi.
In the beginning it’s fun to have a display with touch and control all the stuff in your home but that is not really making it smart.
Making your system to be ‘self thinking’ is more of a challenge and makes the use of manual controlling redundant.

To be able to use your all in one, you need the operating system to have drivers for the display; that’s your first thing to look at.
Whether you use a HDD or SSD is up to you, depending on if you want to invest in extra hardware.
A HDD will work but you probably know it’s slower.

You ‘cannot’ (unless using unofficial versions) on HA on W10 unless you start visualizing and so your system becomes more complicated and and more subject to problems.

Hope you get something from this.
N