Fixing old PCs is not fun...

[Rob Williams]

My grandmother was complaining about her PC being super-slow, and as I knew nothing about it prior to receiving it, I didn't know what to expect. Normally, she will go to my aunt, who works at a computer store, as she repairs PCs all day and was the one who built the machine. But this time, I guess she just wanted things done right or by someone else in general.

After booting it up and waiting for about 8 minutes for things to calm down, I decided to check out the hardware. The first thing I noticed... an 80GB hard drive. No, not SSD... hard drive. Now, my grandmother isn't a person who needs a lot of disk space, but that's beyond the point here. What's important is that an 80GB hard drive would have to be old.

Things just got worse when I checked out the CPU. An Intel Celeron D 3.06GHz single-core. A CPU that cost the grand sum of $43 when it was new... in 2004. I tell you, I was rather blown away when I saw it had 4GB of RAM. That's quite beefy compared to the rest of the machine.

Suffice to say, I'll definitely be building her a PC about a thousand times better with parts I have lying around here. Possibly even might jump on Lynx once it becomes available since it'd be perfect for her needs.

*sigh*

I hate fixing old PCs

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Someone dumped a PC on my desk a couple weeks back, so I could fix it... Pentium 3 with a 20GB IDE drive running XP.... I guess ME wasn't good enough .

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I actually like working on old PCs. For me it sort of brings back memories. While my HP laptop is away, I'm playing old games and web surfing on a 10-year-old Acer computer:

112GB Maxtor HDD
NVIDIA Geforce 4 MMX 440 (AGP 8x)
Pentium 4 2.66Ghz

It was super slow before I worked my magic on it. Now it's at least decent.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

It's not so much the hardware i don't like working with, that's fine... it's the explaining to someone with no PC knowledge that I can't install this 500GB hard drive in their system because it doesn't have SATA ports... or i can't install the latest OS or upgrade its memory because it can't handle it... then they snap back that "Don't tell me to buy a new PC..." - Well tough, i can't do miracles, i can't help it that SDRAM is now the same price as a new laptop...

Heh... it's like people going to the Doc and asking for specific medication - without them knowing what it's for or how it works... they want it - now give it...

 

[Optix]

Rob knows all about my mad hate for fixing old PCs. I think I whined about it like an old lady for about a week when I was asked to fix an old Dell.

 

[Kayden]

If I ever need Rob to fix an old machine I will be sure to bring a tampon for him (c;

I don't mind old tech it has it's uses, like my kids machine is my old AMD 3400 with 2gb of ram and 120gb hdd, for playing web based games it's perfect for them. Since they aren't using I just might put it to use as a Linux machine to cut my teeth on.

 

[Psi*]

Ahhhh! The good grandson

 

[eunoia]

I like working on old machines because it's every bit as much challenge getting the most performance out of them as the latest, most powerful ones.

There has to be a cut off point though, and sure, when the whole shebang is worth less than $100-$200 bucks...

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

Yeah, Eunoia, that's what I do. I used to have an old Windows 95 computer with a Pentium, less than 1G HDD, and I think less than 512MB of RAM. Sometimes I wish I had kept it, but it really had become useless.