![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I like to take old, discarded computers and get them working again. I still have a few from "The Haul" that I'm playing with. I've been able to put one to good use and have plans for the others. However, I just discovered Craig's List.
This will not end well.
After a few stabs and offers that came to naught - and laughing at the people trying to sell junk - I finally got a decent bargain - a clean looking E Machine (fairly old I admit) that needed a new hard drive. It came with a huge tube monitor, but I decided to risk it and made the purchase. The young man needed the money so I felt okay with it.
And actually, it was going fairly well. I cleaned it up a bit, put in a new-to-me hard drive and installed XUbuntu Linux. Seemed to work okay. However, there was still a lot of dirt in the CPU heat sink. To clean it I needed to remove it. It's a good thing to do and I could apply new heat sink compound and make the CPU run cooler.
When I removed the heat sink the CPU came with it. That's... not supposed to happen. The old heat sink compound had turned to cement. I didn't even pull on it that hard yet it came right out of the socket. I needed to use a screw driver to pry it off the heat sink.
Da-yum.
After straightening out some bent pins on the CPU and cleaning the heat sink I reassembled everything and... the computer won't boot now. Could be the CPU that got damaged... could be the motherboard... could be both. What's left in parts is not worth what I paid for it.
Sometimes you're the window... sometimes you're the bug.
-m
This will not end well.
After a few stabs and offers that came to naught - and laughing at the people trying to sell junk - I finally got a decent bargain - a clean looking E Machine (fairly old I admit) that needed a new hard drive. It came with a huge tube monitor, but I decided to risk it and made the purchase. The young man needed the money so I felt okay with it.
And actually, it was going fairly well. I cleaned it up a bit, put in a new-to-me hard drive and installed XUbuntu Linux. Seemed to work okay. However, there was still a lot of dirt in the CPU heat sink. To clean it I needed to remove it. It's a good thing to do and I could apply new heat sink compound and make the CPU run cooler.
When I removed the heat sink the CPU came with it. That's... not supposed to happen. The old heat sink compound had turned to cement. I didn't even pull on it that hard yet it came right out of the socket. I needed to use a screw driver to pry it off the heat sink.
Da-yum.
After straightening out some bent pins on the CPU and cleaning the heat sink I reassembled everything and... the computer won't boot now. Could be the CPU that got damaged... could be the motherboard... could be both. What's left in parts is not worth what I paid for it.
Sometimes you're the window... sometimes you're the bug.
-m
Tags: