The Great Computer Project Submitted Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - 3:49:37 PM by Klaitu
I end up fixing computers quite regularly for people, and usually it's something the user has done.. and rarely does it involve opening the case and messing with all the bells and whistles inside.
Well, the other day my aunt got herself a laptop, and decided that she didn't need her desktop PC anymore, so she gave it to me.
Now, a lot of you people would think "oh great, a crappy old PC" but to me, this PC was a surprising treasure trove of goodness.
It was a home-assembled computer, and whoever assembled it had some strange ideas about PC design.
The lone hard drive that was in it was a 13.6 GB drive from the year 2000. It was connected to the motherboard using a 40 ribbon cable. This type of ribbon cable is appropriate for the hard drive, but you wouldn't expect to see an old 40 type IDE cable in a modern computer.
The motherboard was an AGP board. AGP is quite old, PCI-E is still the motherboard standard now (although I hear that's about to change). The AGP thing wouldn't be surprising except that the Processor fitted into the motherboard is a 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium D (Dual Core) Processor. This Processor was the bad mamma jamma in perhaps 2007, long after AGP was already dead.
Actually, I'm surprised that they would even make an AGP board that supported that processor.
The video card was an ATI Radeon 1650 PRO, an old crappy budget video card. Some of the video RAM was blown out, so the card would just show garbage if you tried to use it. This card requires a 350 watt power supply, but the PC had a 250 in it.. and on top of all that, someone had tried to overclock the card, as evidenced by the partially melted plastic air baffle on the card. I don't know what they were thinking there, the 1650 is crap all the way around.
Also on the rails was a crappy Dynex brand audio board. The motherboard has its own audio system, sO I don't know why you would pay extra for a crappy audio board when you already have a crappy audio board.
Anyways, because of the beefy processor (and 2 gigs of DDR 1 RAM that had been overclocked for no reason) I decided to use this PC as my new server PC. My previous server PC has a 1.3 Ghz single core CPU.
I put in all the drives and reinstalled Vista (you make do with what you can) and now it works like a charm, after I removed some of the extra bits.
I think I've got enough parts left over to get my old server PC into working condition again as well, so that will be fun!
Don't worry though, readers. Nerd time is over for now!
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