Last month, I upgraded my primary computer and one thing that sort of disappointed me about that event was that the old computer was still quite serviceable. Aside from the need to support larger hard drives, it was perfectly fine. After I finished the new built, I boxed up the old parts and left them stored for some unknown future day.
While I am still in my personal rebuilding phase, I’m playing around with a lot of ideas. Most of those ideas are things from my past. One specific one is music – playing, recording, etc. So as I mulled this over, I considered the setup plan. One thing I wanted was to not use my primary computer for the audio recording, as I had always done in the past. While all computers are powerful enough to multitask like that now, I just didn’t want the clutter. And that’s when I remembered I had a whole other quite serviceable computer sitting in a box. All it needed was a new case. That makes the idea much more reasonable from a cost perspective.
I got to work shopping for a new computer case, which was easy and not easy at the same time. I wanted a desktop case (horizontal orientation), but it seems they just don’t make those anymore. Too old fashioned, I guess. So I shopped for the smallest tower case I could find. And since this was a secondary system that would be limited in purpose, I bought the cheapest thing available. And I bought a cheap power supply to install in it, too. Maybe a total spend of $60. Everything else I already had ready to go – monitor, cables, drives, RAM.
The case arrived the other day and I wanted to get a jump on things by installing the motherboard in right away. Upon opening the box, I saw that all the front panels for the drive bays had popped off. Then I noted the front panel was also popped off. This gave me a bad feeling. After extracting the case from the packing material, I was left with a collection of plastic tabs all over the table. It appears the box was dropped or mangled in some way to basically shear the front panel straight off. Every plastic tab that held the front panel to the case was broken off. Not a single one was spared.
I’m not going to go through a bunch of RMA bullshit for a $30 case, but I’m also not going to just pitch it or give up on it. I went to the garage and got my big box of miscellaneous screws and permanently attached the plastic panel back to the case with sheet metal screws. That’ll show ‘em. And without further incident, I installed the motherboard, video card, and hard drives in the case. Now I just had to await the arrival of the power supply, which would come the next day.
This computer would be one of those unheard of systems that runs off-network. No updates ever; first install-last install. File transfer and backup would be via USB drives to my primary computer. Ah, the good old days. Time will tell if Windows 10 can even survive in this environment. If not, well I suppose I could drop back to Windows 7. Windows 7 is near end-of-life with security updates being phased out in January 2020, but on an unnetworked computer, what’s security?
Next up, software.
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