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Generic Junk Resurection! A long fun lil story.
Hey guys haven't posted in awhile, haven't had any problems and I do a lot less PC related stuff these days! Anyhow so this maybe a long story but in short im looking for ideas on an Older PC I just tweaked back into running condition. (skip to bold below if you really don't care to hear the full story)
So to start off with Here in Dallas we have a place called Goodwill Computers,,, Yep that "Goodwill" they have tons of older PC stuff,,,, sometimes good deals but most the time not, So about a year ago I went there with a friend who I built a pc for a year or two before that,,, it was running hot so I figured we would go buy a few fans or something. Instead I see this sweet in like new condition Antec gaming type case with a motherboard and power supply in it for 25 bucks,,, so I talk her into getting it,, assuming the powersupply and motherboard are bad the case is not and it has 4 led 80mm fans in it. So I sawp everything out and take her old parts and case (generic white case) I set the motherboard assumed to be dead in the old white case and brought it all home.
This sat in my garage over a year till one day another friend says he needs a powersupply,,, so we scrounge through the garage and find the old case in there. We pull the supply and it works for him fine. Now a few more months go by and im bored one day so I thought ya know I wonder if that old junk will fire up!! so I scrounge some parts together and whaaaa La! fires right up,, I check the bios settings and see its just an old P4 2.8Ghz CPU but I thought what the heck may as well make something of it!!
So the next day I assemble the PC a bit more complete and do some further testing and find out that it will not read/find anything in the sata ports. So remembering I had and old IDE drive got that out and whaaaa La there she goes! Works good so I install windows 7 from a USB drive and start running updates and the hard drive fails! starts giving me errors ect,,,, So I thought well Maybe I will run by Goodwill again and see what I can find cheep! So I find two older intel looking motherboards with CPU in them but I couldn't see them cuz my eyes are bad I just figured for 5 bucks each its worth a try. so I get them and an IDE dvdrw drive a sata dvdrw and an 120Gb sata drive and a few sata cords all for a whoping 36 bucks! So I get home and the first thing I do is get out the magnifying glass to see what my CPU's are,,,, Whooooa! Score!! core 2 duo E8400's But do they work??,,, I slap a Heat sink on added some ram , bench fired up and whaaaa la! perfect!! only real prob is they are dell mother boards from a Dell Vostros 220. I get a couple errors upon boot pertaining to no front usbs and no chassis fan but ive completed one of these boards in this old generic white case,,, Heres my specs!
- Older Basic White/Beige case
- Dell Vostros Motherboard with Intel G45 Chipset and graphics,,, does not have built in IDE ports it is sata only with a PCIe slot Mini PCi and 2 normal pci slots.
- Core 2 Duo E8400 Dual core 3ghz CPU Not super fast but forsure not slow.
- 2.5Gb DDR2 - 1-2gb stick and one Corsair XMS 512mb stick
- Newer Antec Earthwatts Green 380 Watt power supply with plenty of extra plugs for later upgrades.
- Sata DVD RW Superwriter Drive
- Sata 120Gb Seagate 7200 RPM Hard Drive
- Windows 7 Ultimate 32Bit operating system Fully updated and activated
This system has a 3.4 Windows Index Score held back from 3.8 by lack of a good graphics card being installed.
So now if you read all that heres my questions to you guys,,, I have no use for this PC so I want to do something different with it,, paint it cool maybe? make it info a small server maybe? maybe add Ubuntu to it too and play with that some? I don't know,,, but the case really is a kiiler its so old and ugly! I thought maybe id upgrade to a better one but im done spending money on this thing! Thought maybe ill sell it but its not work what I have into it.
So what would you do with an ugly old beast like this?????