Generic Junk Resurection! A long fun lil story.

[JRockZ]

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?????

 

[Dude]

If you don' t have a need for it, donate it to a local place that needs a computer.

 

[RoasterMen]

Donate it to me and I will put in a GTX 750 on it >

 

[JRockZ]

I have thought of donating it to someone that needs it!! ad I will when it comes down to it but I still want to do something more with it, something to make it cooler! since the case is steel I thought maybe strip it to bare metal and let it rust up some like an old rat rod hot rod,,,, then matte clear it when it looks right and paint the front a chocolate brown or maybe flat black,,, I don't know im undescided but I need something fun to do today so I may get the old sander out and give that idea a whirl!