My Other Hobby, Computer Building & Repair

[tardis454]

As some of you may know I build and repair computers. It's something I've done for nearly 2 decades. I mostly do Linux builds but I've been known to bring a few Windows installs back to fight another day. Our shop moved, and there's this virus thing going on, and I've received 14 computers in the last month. My coworkers and friends have been feeding me a steady stream of what they consider junk PC's. I've fixed 11 out of 14 which is pretty good plus I sold one, and I might have a buyer for another one. I try to keep my computer hobby a hobby and not a business. When a hobby becomes a business it's no longer fun or interesting and you tend to lose the drive to learn in my opinion. Here are some of the pc's I've owned for many years, and some I've been building and working on.

The closet parts bin. I have a few towers and laptops hidden in here, and a motherboard or 2..



I've collect old beige towers for 'sleeper' builds. The beige tower in this pic will be getting an AMD Ryzen soon.
The Dell in the middle is parts, the Dell next to the Dell is sleeper tower, the Lenovo Thinkcentre is a functional "Borg" themed PC.



The PC on the left is my old faithful Pentium 4 machine which still works, great. The one on the right is a NAS server I built out of a Dell 2350.
I highly recommend NAS (Network Attached Storage) servers, they rule. They're not hard to build either with an old PC and a little patience.




My custom built AMD Phenom II quad core, aka my main office rig and what I'm typing this post on now.
It's a tank that's been powered on for 10yrs. It runs Win 7 and will be replaced with a Linux Ryzen build.



My free Dell XPS 410 with Umbrella Corp theme, and the new free Lenovo Ideapad with MX Linux 19.
The Ideapad is from a coworker and it came to me with a torn out power jack. I glued the jack back in today and put MX Linux on it.



The XPS 410 was left for dead by a friend. I bought about $50 worth of parts and got it going again.
I works perfect, it's fast for what it is, and it's solid running Peppermint Linux 64bit.
I went so far as to modify the login screen to make it look like a legit Umbrella Corp PC..




My old Acer laptop. I got this from my mom about 6yrs ago. I've sold thousands of dollar in car parts with this thing when I worked at the junkyard.
It's now semi-retired running Peppermint linux with a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy theme..



I saved the best for last, my Lenovo Thinkpad T-500. I paid $17 for it and added a $26 SSD and some RAM I had laying around.
I installed Manjaro Linux which is a fork of Arch Linux, one of the toughest linux OS's to learn. I use this thing almost exclusively.



I have a computer problem, I can't get enough of them lol! The hobby keeps me out of bars and jail and lately it keeps me from smoking cigarettes. I'll add more to this thread when i get more stuff to work on. Oh and not pictured.. My Dell M-90 that's at work, and wife's free Lenovo Thinkcentre PC ..

[SuperBuickGuy]

I have a computer guy near my office - Computer Surplus - and he does something that (if you're not already doing) you should. He lets people drop off their non-working computers, charges them a $5.00 (or more depending if it's a printer) disposal fee, then mines the electronics for their rare metals. He also maintains a ready supply of old computers that he sells to companies who disposed of their old systems only to realize they needed some function from those machines.... he's doing quite well (also a heck of a nice guy). He also does data recovery.

He also avoids, like the plague, government jobs.... why, you may ask.... oh let me tell you a cautionary tale. So government comes to computer disposal company (the article) https://www.seattletimes.com/busines...irm-to-prison/
and the nutshell. The article doesn't mention that government brought him computers, signed an agreement that didn't comply with all the laws, then when he was almost bankrupt following their guidelines, arrested and charged him. Never deal with the government... especially not in computers.

[RockJustRock]

Computers are a lot of fun. The function is there because the computing power requirements have been flat for some time, but technology keeps advancing. You can do a lot with an old computer. Changing hands is another matter. Everybody likes the idea of a cheap old computer for SOMEBODY ELSE to use. I like the idea of getting more people computer capable and literate, but they can't really adapt to the idea it is just a tool. They just want to do "computer things" that they have no idea what they are.

At one time before the web I went to tech company salvage sales and swap meets and sold through The Recycler. Recent years have been all buys on E-Bay and sales and gifts to friends and neighbors.

My current box is nice. It's Asus motherboard, Coolermaster case, 16 Gb ram, 1st gen I7 870. Got it for $100. Added a $20 SSD. I like my racing games so I bought a 4 Gb RX580 graphics card from a bitcoin mining guy for $100. It runs the newest stuff at 60 FPS 1080P. My monitor I first bought a gaming monitor that said cracked but functional. Unfortunately that meant half the screen black, but hey $25 shipped and it had a really nice pedestal. Bought a 24" ViewSonic for another $25 sans pedestal so all is good.

Never been a Linux guy. Used an activator for Win 7 a long time but now any COA for Win 7 or better the key will activate Win 10. I moved the SSD from a Dell to this box and it updated and activated fine.

Linus Tech on YouTube has a pretty decent mix of videos by content. Everything from $10K and UP custom builds to making basic cheap desktops gaming capable.

[RockJustRock]

Typical Linus Tech. He does Steaths too.

[squirrel]

I still have this computer, but don't use it much.

https://bangshift.com/forum/forum/bangshift/general-discussion/21630-you-hammer-welded-what

I'm down to somewhere around 15-20 computers here now, used to have close to 100.

[RockJustRock]

Correction, Linus calls his sleepers.

[Barry Donovan]

I have been at the pc building since my compaq 5600i. After I had I never felt so ripped off. As if revenge was setting in.

I was in the super nerd club for all of 3 minutes when I overclocked my 900 athlon to 1013mhz...1999 I think?
there was only a handful going past a ghz.

I do not keep track of what I have built. But i do have that same dell box you have all ready to go with.. i forget what I built.
holding a lamp right now in my living room. Brand new, it is my brand new backup. Only run to verify the new stuff I put together runs.

those old boxes just need to start with a late power supply...they may stick deionizing the cheap original, but it is worth it

I am currently running a 2012 xeon (e3-1270) on an aftermarket board...my box is the antec 2600. made and bought in 2003.
the xeon is my best build yet

anybody in the solid state drives? I am slacking... should try one.

yes that says 18 days runtime.
I have caught it going towards 2 months. no real reason.

[RockJustRock]

I've been running SSDs over 5 years. They are a MUST and now very cheap. Samsung is the best and can be had for $50 or less. My AData cheapie was $20. I lust for a 2 TB for data and games, but $200. Long term I won't be happy until I have NVME PCIE on the motherboard. Just seems logical, on board storage.

[tardis454]

anybody in the solid state drives? I am slacking... should try one.

Buy one used off of eBay Barry, you can get them cheap. I waited for SSD's to go down in price before I got in, and the prices are very reasonable now. You'll never use a HDD for an OS drive again after switching to a SSD. There's a substantial difference in speed. You can clone your current OS drive to a SSD with Macrium which is free. It takes about 20 minutes. I did that on my main AMD PC a few yrs ago. I switched to a Samsung EVO 860 250g. That was the best upgrade I've done to that PC aside from the 750TI gpu..

I buy SSD's used in bulk off eBay, 4 or more at a time. So far I've bought about 20 with good success. I check them with Crystal Disk and most of them have been in the 90% range. I buy 128-256g MLC drives with DRAM for OS only drives; Crucial M4's, M500's, Cisco M550's, Microns, Samsungs, etc are what I look for. I stay away from DRAMless and TLC drives, they're ok for storage, but too volatile to use as an OS drive. Samsung EVO's are the best in my opinion. If I do a build that requires a solid reliable SSD I use an EVO everytime. I use traditional HDD's for storage. My server has a 250g in it now but I plan on upgrading to 3 1TB HDD's when I rebuild it.

Another thing I've been doing a lot of lately is converting Core2Duo machines to Core2Quad. Core2Quad CPU's are dirt cheap these days. I bought 2 Q8200 2.3ghz Core2Quads for $7 a piece shipped, and a Q6600 2.4ghz Core2Quad for $10 shipped. The speed increase is very noticeable.

[squirrel]

The machine I've been using for the past 7 years has an i5 processor. It seems they don't cost much less these days, than they did then. And the new ones for the same money aren't significantly faster (has to be at least 2x faster for me to notice anything, 5x I might be interested in spending money)

I guess if I were gaming, then it would be worth buying a decent graphics card and cpu and modern mobo...but this old stuff still works for what I do.

SSDs are great, been using them for several years now. But I use hard drives pretty often, just to remind myself how slow things used to be. Takes a minute or so for my 25 year old mac (68040 cpu) to boot up, it has a HD. My modern computer with ssd is under 20 seconds, most of that is the bios getting going..

[RockJustRock]

I always wonder how much tech we would have without porn and games. CPU upgrades are always over rated. Multi threading is still not fully implemented, but more threads. Years ago Tom\s Hardware started saying anything above a certain level CPU was pointless for anything but Enterprise. It's just some will pay anything for the best of anything.

But yeah, nobody doesn't like SSDs. Get one quick Barry. I want to hear you freak out. Boot up is amazing but you can even feel it opening your browser.

[RockJustRock]

Oh yeah. Desktop widgets. Clock, Calendar, Net traffic and particularly CPU and memory usage. Retrofit them to Win 10. I just caught a bitcoin miner hogging 40% CPU via a Chrome extension that loaded at boot. Gotta have the gauges.

[Beagle]

(This is not a gamer's perspective, but I still like my toys)

+1 on Samsung EVO SSD being pretty robust for a consumer drive.

It's amazing how much things have changed. I paid more for my first 4 meg of memory than for my current lab server. Dell r710 (single 6 core, 48gb ram) was dirt cheap and runs Server 2019 no problems. Old spindles can be fragile, just like a SSD with a bunch of writes on it. It ate every disc in it after a couple of months of fairly serious abuse (lots of writes). I'm kind of done with buying new spindled disk drives at this point, but that's my only real concern with SSD moving forward. There are a finite number of writes they are designed for.

Western Digital home owner drives really disappointed me. I put a couple of 3TB "red" drives in there and they didn't survive the first lab I built on them. Never again. Replaced them with 2 Samsung EVO 1 TB drives for the OS and frequently used data, and 4 x 6TB Seagate Ironwolf "Pro" for long term storage and backups. It's been smooth sailing since.

I got a couple of i5 Dell pizza boxes to create a hardware cluster (machines are identical) and they came with 256gb Inland solid state SATA type drives (the 40.00 kind). I put another M.2 NVMe drive in each of them for OS drives, 256gb , 40.00 each, and the difference between the two is quite noticeable... I literally giggled while installing Server 2019 on them. Not only are the drives tiny, they scream. If your machine has a space for M.2 drives, I'd very seriously consider one for the operating system drive.

The interesting thing these days - building your own isn't really cost effective any more. If you really need HP for a project, rent it. We have a 1gb internet connection so it's rare that you're waiting on the network, so using somebody else's hardware budget is appealing for some things. Doing the heavy lifting work in the cloud doesn't require another air conditioner for the office either. I kind of hate it, but I can see the economics of it. On the other hand, I don't let the servers on the internet, so on premise stuff still has it's place... 737 loud fans and heat and feeding 2 800w power supplies and all.

Is it just me, or does saying "Drive" for a solid state storage device sound about the same as "Dial" a telephone number?

[squirrel]

Did you videotape that? Or catch that film?

[RockJustRock]

10,000 words on a 200 word subject, but somewhere in that pot of geek soup is the last word on system ram.