old PC finally complete
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Late this summer, we went to a "recycle shop" that Mari had found online. They are places where you can get used stuff. While used stuff in Japan is generally in far better shape than you'd find it in Canada, the stores are almost uniformly dismal places with baleful lighting, indifferent staff, and just-OK stuff out on the floor. Having just moved back to Tokyo, we were looking for a fridge and a washer-dryer. At this store, we found helpful people who seemed to enjoy their jobs. And good stuff everywhere, including jewelry, furnishings, and electronics that all appeared to be in good shape. These people seemed to have a good eye for used stuff. They had surf boards in the rafters that made it feel fun and not like just another dispirited recycle shop.
They had a washer-dryer that Mari liked, and they had a fridge that she'd already seen at another location. So we wound up spending so much that they gave us a 10% credit. The Girl got the hat in the pic below and Mari chose a bathroom scale and I found a nice wooden serving board (and child paddler). I also spotted an old ex-corporate Dell PC for a price of all of ¥15,000 (about $200). That's about the price of the Windows license for a new PC, and like most old corporate boxes, this had a Windows 7 license key sticker on it that you can use to upgrade to the current Windows for free.
Which brings me to the point of this journal entry. I've now fixed up the PC with a number of upgrades, as I'd intended from that day in September.
The first things to go where all the internal fans that collectively put out an intolerable amount of noise. This meant replacing the decade-old power supply as well as the system and CPU cooling fans. The power supply replacement was optional but I'd strongly recommend this course for anyone doing a similar rebuild. Old power supplies are semi-jokingly referred to as "IED" (improved explosive devices) in the nerd circles that discuss such rebuilds. Because they tend to cause fires. While a Dell box from back in that company's hey-day wouldn't necessarily have such an IED, the old power units were inefficient to start with and by now I'm certain it would have degraded - the sound of the fan told me all I needed to know. Also, old power units had a strange design limitation: they were open only to the exterior of the case, which meant that they not only didn't ventilate well but they also didn't assist with drawing hot air out of the interior of the PC. Modern units have an open top and sometimes second fan for drawing out hot air from the PC. I bought one of these for about ¥4000 that had the exact dimensions I needed - in the PC world there are parts for everything!
The CPU and case fans were inexpensive replacements averaging around ¥1250. Modern fans are much lighter than the old ones, and nearly silent. They also do a better job of ventilation and use much less power. To the point that I replaced the system fan with both an intake fan (left over from Ken's PC build) at the front of the case and an output fan at the back. The old steel case is so much better ventilated now that the fans run at a low speed and the whole thing is quite quiet.
I also demoted the 1TB hard drive to a data drive and installed an inexpensive solid-state drive as the main boot drive. This would add much-needed speed to booting and running applications.
I replaced the 2GB of RAM with two new 4GB cards at ¥3420.
I also stripped out the old CD (or possibly DVD) drive as dead-weight. This again allowed better airflow and was redundant to the external Blue Ray Data drive that I'd picked up in the spring (for another ¥2000). That drive allows me to write 25GB disks that will last at least 25 years, unlike CD's and DVD's which are generally useless after about five years. The difference in the technology is that the latter use ink while the former burn a physical difference into the disk.
The last change I made was a gorgeous little USB 3 adapter. I had no idea that the baby PCIE slot tucked under the video card would be of any use but when I spotted this amazing gizmo I realized that my days of two-hour BR-D writes and interminable SD card reads were over. For a bit under ¥2000 I could now attach the external RAID-1 drive bay we'd brought from Canada, and I could attach my disk burner or SD card reader as needed.
At this point, this is what I'd spent:
PC ¥ 0 (store credit)Windows ¥ 0 (old Windows 7 license on sticker)
solid state drive ¥6180
RAM ¥3420
power supply ¥4200
80mm CPU fan ¥ 970
92mm system fan ¥1499
fan power splitter ¥ 336
USB adapter ¥1922
total ¥18,527
This is about $225. But there was still one problem. The video card was an absurdly cheap and nasty unit from the time when the PC was built (around 2009). It didn't have the brawn to support my 4k monitor, and it didn't have any compatible ports. This was fine when I bought the PC as Mari wasn't working and I could attach my old monitor to it - a Dell as it happened, but even older dating to 2007. But with Mari now working with the monitor from our dining table, I was left without a way of doing things like editing my photos.
Enter Grandma's Christmas gift. A Zotac* GT 1030 video card for about ¥12,500. While abruptly increasing the expense of the PC by 60%, this allowed me to resume normal use of the PC. It also eliminated the last noisy fan from the system, so it now runs quiet. All in, ¥31,000 (about $375) for a PC driven by an i7 that supports all my peripherals seems pretty good. What's interesting about this particular model is that it's compatible with the low-Wattage motherboards used in the old Dell and HP corporate PC's of yore. It sips power at only 30 Watts, meaning in this case it could not only replace the antique that had come with the system but actually use less power.
*What a name. I later realized that this was the same brand as the video card we bought for Ken's PC.