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revamping an old PC

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I've mentioned that I bought an old Dell PC for about 15,000 yen (maybe $CA180). Having pulled out my even older Dell monitor (back from its nine year tour of our bedroom in Canada) I've confirmed that everything boots. It has an old Japanese-language installation of Windows 7, 4GB of RAM, and a Terabyte hard drive. Needless to say, it runs a bit loud.

Today a bundle of goodies arrived. I replaced the CPU fan (one of those 8cm jobbies that happily just clips into place on top of the heat sink fans) and the 9cm (honestly) case fan. For about $20, I'd eliminated half the noise!

I replaced the RAM with 8GB of the fastest chips the old system would support - 1333MHz! And then I installed Windows 10. It's possible to do this with an old Windows 7 license that you typically find on the outside of a used PC or laptop. This license saved me the cost of a new license, which would be about the price of the PC.

I still have a new power supply to install, but it'll have to wait for the weekend. I think the tiny fan on the old video card is dying, as the whole system still makes a fair bit of noise, but I can live with a single source of noise.

We did some tests of various software. Simcity 4 (circa 2003) works nicely. I have high hopes for the open source alternative to Lightroom that The Girl and I will be using for editing our photos!

Because there's so much I/O planned, I also spent about $40 on a USB 3.0 PCIE 1x card, it's tiny and perfect and I'm a bit surprised things like that are still on the market because USB 3.0 is not new. I've been getting real USB 3 speeds out of it.