I will not be denied...

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
12/29/2016 at 23:43 • Filed to: None

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...the use of all four USB 3.0 ports on the card installed in the PCIe slot that I should not be able to use (based on its location). A little soldering was necessary to get the appropriate right-angle SATA power connector for the hard drive, but no permanent changes were necessary to make everything work.

HAH! Take that, Dell...

DISCUSSION (8)

Jarrett - [BRZ Boi] > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/29/2016 at 23:57

TheRevanchist > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/30/2016 at 00:53

I don’t know about Dell these days, but they used to make all their PCs so it was damn near impossible to replace parts. Mobo go out? You won’t find one that will fit their case. They wanted you to spend money to either get their parts or a new computer from them. Stupid jerks!

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > TheRevanchist
12/30/2016 at 01:07

Nothing has changed. The last experiment was with a power supply that was ATX in size and connector but with proprietary wiring. I did swap a power supply from a Compaq into another broken Dell, but that was probably the exception to the rule.

They may be quite proprietary, but they’re also cheap and disposable. None of the ones I’ve been using lately have cost me over $20, even the i5s, so if they die I just toss them and grab another. They’re the Camry of computers; useful and common and you never have to worry about developing any attachment to them.

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/30/2016 at 09:07

Wow, that’s cheap, although the i5 branding doesn’t really say it’s that modern anymore. The earliest ones were from 2010, which by computer standards is prehistoric. What generation are we talking here?

The way they are not maintainable drives me crazy. Inside the case, about all I can expect is that memory slots and SATA cables adhere to a standard. It’s so frustrating when someone wants an old Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc computer repaired... Then again, once you get past using HDDs, there’s not much beyond the PSU that fails in a modern computer with any regularity.

The standardization of PC components is why the PC as we know it won the microcomputer wars. It’s mind boggling that some of the major manufacturers have embraced and got away with using non-standards-compliant components.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Eric @ opposite-lock.com
12/30/2016 at 12:55

These are 1st generation machines, so yeah, nothing to get too excited about. But they’re faster than the C2D machines I was (am) using, so it’s a nice little boost in performance.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to purchase anything from Dell, but if the price is right I can tolerate their stuff. I don’t need SFF machines and actually prefer full towers, but you take what you can get when you can get it...

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/30/2016 at 15:01

Yeah, they’re not bad, but power consumption keeps going down. I guess at $20 it would take a long time to use that much more power than a more modern machine, though. I’m still running a 4th-gen in both my desktops (work and home). My main laptop is an archaic 2nd-gen i7 with an SSD that was too slow to reissue to the field people, so I slapped Xubuntu on it and it runs fine. The battery is all-but shot, though. It isn’t exactly suffering since the main bottleneck is disk I/O.

One of my friends that is a gamer runs processors for 5+ years before replacing with a new combo because they’re not generally much of a bottleneck anymore...

I actually prefer SFF machines, strongly, but I like them to be standards-compliant so I can swap parts and reuse some of the parts indefinitely. There’s no reason to waste money and energy on a new case when you could simply replace the guts, for example. There are negatives, which is why for gaming rigs and anything I expect I might need to upgrade, I stick to uATX.

The last machine I built was a server with a Mini-ITX board and SSDs. It’s incredibly fast relative to their old server and uses so little power that they could see it in their power bill when I turned the old one off.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Eric @ opposite-lock.com
12/30/2016 at 20:37

I’ve been using the same ancient Antec case for my gaming PC for nearly 15 years now. I like having options. The SFF machines are kind of nice for single function or backup machines and they don’t really get in the way. Not much expandability, but that’s to be expected and not a concern.

I know when I went from a PowerMac G4 to a Mac mini I could see a noticeable reduction in my electric bill. I don’t use my gaming rig very often because I find that I can’t have it and a space heater running in the same room or I trip a breaker. But thankfully the computer acts like a space heater, which is great in winter but sucks in summer.

My previous main laptop was a 2008 MacBook Pro I also found at Goodwill. It was beat to hell, but still ran. $50 in parts and a few items out of my collection and it still does surprisingly well for a 9 year old machine; it’s dual boot so I’m running OS X 10.11 as well as Windows 7. I did get a beat up Acer from a friend and brought it back from the dead, swapping the Celeron for an i5, adding a tonne of memory and an SSD. It too is an older machine, but it’s faster than it has any right to be. It looks like shit because of what his kids did to it, but it works fine.

XJDano > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/08/2017 at 23:08

I know this is a bit out of left field, but along with this post and comments, the next renovation I’m working at left a few dell computers behind, think they are worth anything? At all or just parts?

Reading all these comments you may be about the only person i know that would be remotely interested in these.

I can get some photos tomorrow around lunch. But most look like Dells and some are longer with 2power pack things in the back.

They are at the old CIS photo place after they went out of business and liquidated they just left them behind.

Shoot me an email when to get together to install those door closers too. xjrabbitt gmail.