What do you do with your old systems?

petpetpet

petpetpet

petpetpet

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8 Feb 2021
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I've built a new system. Wondering what to do with my old (perfectly serviceable for non-gaming, or old games @ 1080p) system.

Anyone use any used-pc charities or whatever that would take a working-but-without-an-OS computer without associated monitor/mouse/keyboard?

Not interested in using it for anything. Too big. Too noisy, and London flats haven't a lot of space.
 
Most of the films and TV shows I watch come from the internet. Even though most TV's are smart now, there are still some big advantages to using a PC as a media machine. So I keep my old PC's and use them for media machines. They also act as a spare in case my main PC suffers a catastrophic issue - which has happened just a few times in the past. Once I have too many media PC's I just sell the parts on the bay. The parts are usually worth more than the whole.
 
I have a habit of keeping old parts, so did something different this time around. With my recent upgrade I decided to just give my old mobo, cpu and RAM to a friend given his system is ancient.

Charity is good if you can afford it. If money is tight, you could sell. With how things are right now, I'm sure someone wild pick it up if the price is right
 
I built a PC tower from old parts,

Cooler master HAF X Full-tower case,
Core 2 Duo 8500 at 3.13 GHz
Socket 775 MSI motherboard
5 Gig of DDR 2 RAM
Zotac GTX 275 GPU
Corsair HX 750 from 2008!
Western Digital Black 1 terabyte hard drive
Kingston SSD Sata 240 gigabytes
Unknown wi-fi card
Creative X-fi Titanium Sound card
Blu ray/DVD-RW drive from Samsung
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit!

I tried Linux Mint, I got bored and bought a cheap Windows 10 Pro key....Ran Memtest86, zero failures with 11 year old RAM!

The biggest issue was the CMOS battery had gone flat, bought a pack and after updating 2021 date from 2008 date in bios, now works fine. Oh and a new CPU fan plus Artic silver 5 thermal paste.

Amazing what you find in your own garage. Think I had most fun, getting all the bits to run together.
 
Normally I never have an old system as I use the old one to fund the new one! As of right now as long as your PC isn't massively outdated then I'd suggest you try and sell it as the market value of most computer components (specifically GPUs) has skyrocketed
 
In the following order:

If the parts will sell well -> I sell the parts.
If the parts are quite new -> They go in my server
If they are low power -> They get put in some project, like my upcoming router
If I have quite a few of them -> I'll build a low end PC out of them and see if it will sell as a unit
If a friend of family member can use them -> given away
Else -> Recycled

If it wasn't already clear I take the ship of Theseus approach of computing. ;)
 
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