How did we get here?
The donation in this case, is a half dozen Optiplex PCs. I acquired these at a yard sale for the whopping sum of just ten bucks, and was convinced I could make something of them. Unknown at the time, there were going to be several factors that would keep most of that from happening. There is a link to the original blog, here.
I made progress in some areas, but soon found out why these machines ended up abandoned. The first issue is that they are very old by PC standards. In an age where consumer PCs work on 16 or 32 cores or threads, most of these had two. I also discovered that these were a BTX design instead of the now standard ATX. This means that the board was an inverted design, and the case was as well.
I couldn’t use the cases for anything else, and the PCs worked off of a nearly twenty year old design. Even trying to create a custom sleeper PC would be very difficult. Still, I managed to salvage a couple for upgrade and began repairing others by cannibalizing. It wasn’t what I was looking to do, but it got several working. It was then that the thought of a donation came to mind.
How did you fix them?
To answer that, I have to explain a bit about some of the actual issues. None had drives in them, but I got HDDs at the same yard sale. Several had bad power supplies and were missing memory, and still one other had a bad memory module. A bad stick of DDR2 tied me up for an extra hour or so of troubleshooting, but the donor PCs had plenty.
I also learned that older PCs are finicky about which port SATA cables are plugged in, and the Bios is not helpful at all. It seems that these older systems want you to plug things in in order. I couldn’t use SATA port 0 and 2 for instance, I had to use 0 and 1. That meant some cables weren’t long enough. Some had floppies, some didn’t. This was going to take a while.
I methodically moved through several steps including new batteries and testing SATA cables, until I got a PC working for every good HDD. That meant six working PCs, all with working drives, and all with a copy of windows 10. I wanted to use an older OS, but don’t have a copy of Win7 or XP to use, and they can always change it. The important part was to get everything working together and gut as few as possible.
It was long, and tedious, but by the end of a day and a half, I had six machines. All of them worked, all had good parts, and all were in good shape, even if they were old. The most important part in my case, was that all of them were off my shelves. I also had one PC that was a donor, but it cleared a lot of room.
You said a donation?
I did. Partially for selfish reasons, but it was also practical. They were taking up space, as were a lot of clothes. For that matter until this morning, so were a lot of boxes and packing material. The boxes, etc. could be recycled, but so couldn’t the PCs and clothes?
I determined last week, that one of the things that would happen in my mini break form work would be catching up on the stuff lying around. The pile of PCs ranked high on that list, so did the mail on my dining room table, and some other stuff, but that’s a different blog.
In the end, I had six working PCs, one that didn’t, and a box of clothes. There is also a Salvation Army donation center not far away. I loaded the car, drove down and I hope helped more than just myself. My goal is not to shift my burden, but to benefit someone besides myself. These are still useable and someone will get a decent computer to check email, or web games or file their taxes. The can’t serve that purpose for me.
I still do have a couple of the PCs. One, upgraded (in a way), one got turned into a sleeper build, video here, and at least two will be for an experiment. If the experiment succeeds, I’ll write about it. I also imagine there will be pics on the custom build page and at least one YouTube video. Speaking of that, here it the link to this story. Enjoy.