# Your Computer Dies: What Parts Do You Save? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 17, 2015, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-computer-dies-what-parts-do-you-save/720215 "2015-05-17T03:23:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2015, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-computer-dies-what-parts-do-you-save/720215/21 "2015-05-18T21:50:06Z")
> [@Lowdown](#): > > (Can this board not do strikethrough? I can’t seem to get it to work.) [del]Yes it can[/del] ---
**Author:** ![Kaio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c68b51/32.png) [@Kaio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kaio)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2015, 6:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-computer-dies-what-parts-do-you-save/720215/22 "2015-05-19T06:41:40Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > I just replace the parts that died. But then I build all my own PCs anyway. I don’t but have friends who do it for me. So I keep everything that still works, until it doesn’t, and replace parts as they wear out. Just replaced mobo and CPU, so now the oldest part is the case, at 9 years old. Everything else has been replaced at least once. ---
**Author:** ![Jake\_Jones](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Jake\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jake_Jones)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2015, 8:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-computer-dies-what-parts-do-you-save/720215/23 "2015-05-19T08:53:46Z")
A quality chassis is good practically forever, absent significant form factor changes and you have to go back to the 90s to not be able to find an ATX compatible motherboard. A substantial power supply is good for a really long time. Floppy drives are obsolete and optical drives are getting close, but both can usually survive through many builds. I’ve only ever purchased one 3.5" floppy, one CDR, one CD-RW one DVD-RW drive. Externals like monitors, keyboard and mouse have their own life-cycle independent of the box. Storage drives are another deal, they definitely expire. I just replaced the platter drives in my internal RAID last year at ~5 years old, but I’m in the process of replacing that with an external NAS RAID now. New motherboard, CPU, RAM, GPU and SSD coming up in the future, but not for worry of component failure. I guess to me, motherboard, CPU and RAM could be considered a single component since by the time one of them goes, the rest is obsolete. People blame RAM all the time, but I’ve never seen it. If MB or CPU fail, it’s a major rebuild and they all go. Fact of the matter is, the only component I’ve had fail catastrophically was a power supply and that killed all the things mentioned above. I don’t buy cheap power supplies anymore. I also had a motherboard that suffered a long and painful death during a bad financial time for me. My “computer” for longer than I care to admit, was a pile of connected parts on a folding table under a suspended box fan. That wasn’t fun at all. In summary, in the event of catastrophic failure, all things are on the chopping block other than the chassis. Mostly I avoid catastrophic failure by purchasing quality components and being aware of their age, life expectancy and importance to the computer as a whole. ---
**Author:** ![Diceman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Diceman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diceman)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2015, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-computer-dies-what-parts-do-you-save/720215/24 "2015-05-19T16:56:44Z")
The last time I upgraded my computer, I saved the case, keyboard, monitor, and mouse. The “guts” of the computer (motherboard, CPU, memory) were too old to be worth anything, and eventually they went to the local DPW yard for recycling. There were 2 hard drives: the “new” hard drive is now the old backup drive on my new system. The “old” drive was too small be worth keeping, so I drilled some holes in it and recycled it with the other stuff. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-computer-dies-what-parts-do-you-save/720215.md?page=1)