I’ve had this beast for over 5 years now and it’s done OK as a PC. It was set up as a specialized video server theatre setup I bought from Goodwill with no hard drive. I pulled the special purpose video cards and sold them on ebay for more than I paid for the machine and put in a hard drive and OS. I learned why it was in Goodwill with no hard drive as once I got it set up it would flake out and reset itself on average about 1-2 times a day. I lived with this and figured it was the motherboard and to buy and set up a new machine would be an expensive PITA. Other than the resets it was a decent machine.
So… lately I have been thinking it’s time to put glitchy down and get a new PC. Been shopping sites looking for deals thinking about configurations etc. Ohhh… I want that! Last week there as Best Buy special on a EVGA 600watt power supply $50 to 30 dollars and I had 10 in BB credits so it was $21 shipped. I figured what the hell you can always use a backup power supply, even for the soon to come new desktop and this was a deal.
I received it the other day and being bored decided to install in in the glitch master just for kicks . Took about 20 minutes to pull the old PS and install the new one. Unit has been Rock. Fucking. Solid ever since. Not god dammed hiccup. It was the fucking cheap to buy and easy to install power supply not the MB! All those years, all that time wasted on resets. Like tears in the rain.
Nice work. Shame about the (perfectly working) PC.
FWIW, I always put power supplies much earlier in a PC diagnostic sequence than motherboards. As you have discovered, a borderline PS can cause stuff like unprovoked reboots, and PS replacements are dead easy and cheap. I try to keep a spare known-good power supply on hand just for that kind of evaluation.
So, whatya gonna do with that old system. It’ll probably run a recent OS decently (albeit slowly, and with most bells and whistles turned off).
I had a PC back in the PC/XT era that was probably pulling exactly however many watts from the PSU that it was rated at (IIRC, 150 watts, or so) and simply turning on a lamp plugged into the same circuit would crash the PC stone dead.
Took a while to realize the connection there as I didn’t often use the lamp on my desk, and it was someone in another room turning things on that was triggering most of the shutdowns.
It’s mid tier Pentium with 4 gigs of RAM that’s probably 7 years old. What really attracted me to it was the gorgeous, solid, thick metal case with an alphanumeric LED display on the front. It had no hard drive. I’m guessing this was intended as a home theatre AV server for someone’s gazillion dollar home theatre setup. To buy a case like that at retail would be almost impossible. It’s intended to look and feel like a high end AV component. I sold the 2 onboard video cards for twice the cost of the PC. Normally the PCs you find at goodwill are pure garbage or too old to be useful.
Goodwill has a partnership with Dell to “recycle” electronics. It was one of the earliest examples of such a program, beginning in 2004. So odds are that some rich person decided to hug a tree when they bought their new Dell media server and saw it came with literature about how to “recycle” their old gear. And that’s how a high-end machine ended up at Goodwill.