Nerding out a bit - computer necromancy

[malada]

I like fussing with old computers. Some are discards from work, some are Craig's list specials, some are garage sale finds and some are gifts from people who upgrade.

And then there's OPTs. That stands for Other People's Trash. 19 inch flatscreen monitor? I'll take that home. Cleaned it up, plugged it in, works fine.

I was messing around for around 3 hours today with a work discard. The disk drive and the power supply were dead so a spare drive, and a power supply from EVGA scratch and dent sale and I've got it booting!

IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!

I need to do a motherboard transplant to another case because the original case is one of those Compaq/HP things that used a non standard power supply. I've got a standard case with a dead motherboard in it so it should work out. Swapping motherboards is my least favorite thing with computer necromancy but you work with what you got.

With some extra ram and maybe a CPU swap from my spares bin I'll have a Pentium 4 - 3.0 Ghz system with 2 gigs of memory. Yes, it's old and slow but it's fun to see something discarded come back to life. In this time of abnormality it makes me feel normal again.

-m

Comments

[siliconshaman]

I keep saying one of these days I'm going to get a black rubber chicken to wave over whatever computer I'm resurrecting at the time... I've been building machines for years, and I think I've built a rig from new parts only once or maybe twice in all that time. Usually because I'm broke though.

[malada]

People misunderstand that a sacrifice needs to be a living animal, a bowl of grain or a precious object to work. Of course, we get to *eat* the animal afterwards so a helping of chicken fried rice will do.

Not fried chicken. Too greasy.

-m

[dewline]

There is something deeply satisfying in reading this, given my own lack of funds and other resources.

I would love to get some extra RAM for my current second-hand iMac. My friend who supplied it argues for stripping out the hard drive to replace it with an SSD instead, but even so...

[malada]

Although more RAM would definitely be a boost, replacing spinning rust with an SSD makes systems much more zippy.

If you don't care about load times - go for the RAM. If you need to pull stuff off of the hard drive a lot - SSD. Just my opinion.

-m