For a good few years I've had an old PC shoved behind the door in my study. Hidden away enough to forget, but not so much as to not stub a toe on occasionally! I've been trying to think about when I built it and it must have been around 2011/12. It was my primary machine for a few years but has pretty much been in storage since we moved in 2017. I'm not sure it was used much for a few years before then.
Yesterday I had the urge to see if it still worked.
Now for context this old thing has been shoved in the loft, spent some time in the garage, generally it has been through every "no no" for something electronic. I'm not going to lie, I didn't have much hope. As you can see by the rather disgraceful covering of dust, bits hanging off and dents - it has seen better days.
Surprisingly, although it didn't load anything due to the disks being scavenged sometime in the past, it turned on without setting me on fire. I say turned on, the fans started and the motherboard displayed lights in the right areas. That led me to whipping it down to its component parts, digging out an old hard disk, giving it a quick clean and putting everything back.
Would you believe it, it only bloody works!
I managed to do a test run with the hard disk I had but it was far from brilliant so I ordered a cheap SSD that got delivered today. This post now comes from a battered old PC that seems jolly stable after being kicked about for over 10 years.
In my early IT days we were told about the dangers of static and touching components. These things are a bit tougher than I thought!
Also, for the first time in a 29 year career in IT, I had to change a BIOS battery!
Specs.
Intel i5 2500k
16GB RAM
512GB SSD
512GB HDD
NVIDIA GTX 460
Battered and dented case
...a sprinkle of magic.
Love it when things we don't expect to work, just works :) Great start to the year mate :D
Win 10 is sketchy though, unless you are thinking of buffering it from the internet. I would say put one of the smaller linuxes there.
Unfortunately I need it running Windows 10 for the degree I'm doing. I've been working on my MacBook Air (M2), but the course is based on Windows. I've been wasting far too much time trying to translate Windows stuff into Mac stuff.
I've a beefy Windows machine in my study but I spend most my life in there as I largely work from home. This seems to be doing the trick of handling stuff (so far), just so I can have a change of scenery. I've got it setup in my bedroom and it's a little like being a teenager again! Tinkering when I should be doing my homework.
Kicks out a good amount of heat too so my room is about 5c warmer than it used to be! Winner.
I know, and miss, that teenager feeling of tinkering with your machine till kingdom come :) Slow shell based internet was very useful for my brain --- zero distractions or at least close to zero :D
Computers are generally reliable for a long time except for power supplies, hard drives, and sometimes capacitors (particular for machines from certain eras).
I've a Commodore 64 that I fear will need a recap. I've not opened it up to find out yet! Ignorance is bliss....until it all goes wrong.
i think the caps in the C64 hold up pretty well. However, i've heard horror stories about the power supplies. Basically, when they fail they tend to fry everything so it is generally recommended that you don't try to use them. There are modern aftermarket ones out there.
I was not aware of that 🙂 Thank you
Result! That's a perfectly usable machine. My PC is a fair few years old and works fine with Linux. Only has 8GB and a little more might improve performance.
It's doing its job wonderfully. I don't need to tax it too much as it's mostly for studying on. Saying that, thanks to Steam I gave Monkey Island a go yesterday and it struggled with temperatures so I looked at that this morning. I love the old games where you don't need a dozen thumbs!
I've just not played any recent PC games and don't have a machine that could handle them. I did revive an ancient MacBook with Linux, but not using it for anything.
I played Monkey Island on the Amiga, but got stuck somewhere. Didn't have the internet to look up tips then. Back then it was on multiple floppies and you had to swap them over at certain points.
I'm trying to concentrate on music rather than games. There's just not time for both.
Some RAM and a OS update probably needed!
Have it running on Windows 10 and it's going well with the 16GB RAM it has. Was going to whack Linux on it, but I'll be using it for my degree and that is being troublesome enough as it is, without adding another complication!
I've not looked how much this board can take (ASUS P8Z68-V LX), but I imagine it's 32GB or something. I'm well out of date with processors and all that stuff now.
😀.. I am hardly current too. 64Gb is commonplace now, but I am only hosting 32Gb.
My Linux PC has 8GB and mostly runs fine. A little more might make it slightly quicker as I think it uses swap at times. I know memory is cheap these days.
I needed to upgrade it some time ago to play 'Legends of Elumia'. It has a couple of dated video cards in used for mining years ago, the extra RAM made a difference.
If you are not gaming, you will get away with it.
I don't play games and just use the motherboard graphics, so it would not impress anyone :)
Congratulations @stav!
You raised your level and are now a Dolphin!