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Just been working on my IBM desktop server. Dual monitors as well. That is my main working machine for all kind of stuff. Got an old HP mini-tower from my girlfriend. Just found out that it has 5 SATA connections. Got the get 4 additional cables, then I can put the 4 360GB drives in and make a RAID as a quick backup machine and to stream my music.
Lately had just started my old DELL INSPIRON up Running a DEBIAN 7 LINUX. They still run but the batteries are nearly dead. After some 15 years still holding 20 - 40 minutes thou.
This weekend I hooked an external monitor to the Alienware and found that the lines showed on it as well, so I know now that it's a graphics card or motherboard issue. So I pulled the graphics card out to try out the 'ol oven trick! Took some of the lines away believe it or not, but it's still not completely right... So I think I'm going to bake it one last time and if it doesn't do anything, I may bake the motherboard and see if it's causing the artifacting.
So I baked the Alienware GPU again, this time for a few more minutes, didn't help though, so I am going to try baking the motherboard and see if that does anything. I also threw an old Radeon 8800XL AGP card into the oven with it that I got for free that was no good at the time, didn't display anything at all, and surprisingly it fixed it! For now anyhow. I tossed in one of my OLD scratch built PC's running an Intel brand motherboard, a 478 socket P4 3ghz with hyperthreading (3.0e model to be exact), 2gb of DDR, and I tossed in a 300gb HD that I plan to try to setup multiple OS's to be able to boot into; :Linux Mint, Windows 98 SE, Windows XP Pro, Windows 7 Ultimate, and may even try Windows 10 on it just to see how it runs it lol. I want to build it into a "retro" PC, something I would have built to be a high end system of the early to mid 2000's.
It's dirty as all heck right now, but I'm just making sure that everything is functional right now. Then I'm going to completely tare it apart and make it spotless. I need to pull the motherboard out anyhow because there's 2 capacitors that I need to replace; one is starting to puff up, and one is actually LEAKING, but the crazy thing is still working lmao
I even scored an old PS2 ball mouse and a PS2 keyboard at the thrift store this weekend for all of $3 to use on it lol. The keyboard was DISCUSTING!!! I completely blew it apart and cleaned it, looks and works like brand new now
Been a while since I built my last PC.
Sometimes customers for whom I do network support have me get rid of their old hardware and take care of data shredding.
once shred, i take what i need.
First build was a linux box with 16 GB RAM on an i3 Processor a 256 GB SSD and 640GB HDD for multimedia station.
Below is the general specs for the computer I put together last year - the one that I use the most - for Internet and misc in my home office. A bit of overkill I thought when I built it, but that's who I am! I have a tendency to keep computers until they 1) fail or 2) can no longer run the software I want. I think the last one went 6 years before the hard drive crashed. Then I study up on what's available and try to build something decent. I'm sure it is very out of date by now.
Went with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G processor (internal video) on an Asus Pro B550M-C motherboard with nearly EVERYTHING else built in. Even has dual M.2 slots, PCIE 4.0, USB 3.2, Only 16GB memory but it is DDR4-3200. Case is a Thermaltake full tower. Still has several open PCI slots in case I need to expand. I have the OS installed on a physically tiny little 500GB WD Black SN770 PCIE 4.0 Solid State Drive, but it doesn't show in the listing below apparently because it is in a M.2 slot and not on a SATA controller. The Wifi/bluetooth is an AX210 6E card installed in the second M.2 slot. The 1.0TB and 2.0TB drives listed below are storage drives that don't get mounted unless I need to use them. OS I use is Linux Mint 21 with the Mate Desktop because I like the old-style-Windows type desktop, not something that was designed for a touch screen.
I can say that with the M.2 PCIE 4.0 solid state drive, it is a pretty speedy computer all around. This drive actually reads at 3.7GB/sec. The 1 TB storage drive is a WD Black SATA3 7200 rpm drive and it benchmarks much lower with only a 112MB/sec read rate. The 2 TB drive is a WD Blue solid state NAND drive and it benchmarks 550 MB/sec reads. You can clearly tell the difference between the "drives".
02-17-2018, 04:56 AM
