Wednesday, August 7th, 2024
Fans and Yard Sales.
Don't forget the dust.
Late. Again
Yes. Late. Again. I know, I know. I’ve been quite busy lately, and so I picked today as the best day to write this post in particular.
Fixing Fans and Adding Ports.
A few weeks ago, I was using my computer, just like I always do. Usually, the GPU makes a racket. The fans have been going bad on it ever since I got it, and they finally died. So I took off one of the case fans, and taped it onto the GPU. At first, I tried it without removing the GPU shroud. Bad idea. It got up to 88C at idle before I shut it off. I burned my finger slightly removing the card. I ended up taping the fan directly onto the heatsink. Problem solved. I did want to put that case fan back, so I had to order another fan. I also ended up getting a front panel with readers for a bunch of different memory cards and USB A and C devices as well. I did have to buy a card with the right headers on it, as my motherboard is too old to care about either of those. That card plugged into the PCIe slot, and then the front panel thingy went into the front panel using a adapter to make it big enough for the 5 ¼ inch front bay.
I also put the fan on the GPU. Zip ties through the holes and everything. Works better and seems to keep the GPU relatively cool. The card reader worked as expected and I haven’t had any problems with it.
Fan taped inside my computer.
GPU removed with new fan zip-tied onto it.
GPU with new fan zip-tied onto it. Side view.
GPU inside computer with new fan on it.
PCIe USB header card.
USB front panel thing.
Yard Sale PC.
It’s what you think it is. A PC from a yard sale. Is it better than my current PC? No. Is it small? Also no. Does it work? Yes.
This is the Yard Sale PC. It has a AMD Athlon XP 2500+ with 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, nVidia GeForce4 Ti4800SE graphics with 128MB of VRAM, a DVD drive, a CD drive, and even a floppy drive.
The PC came with no front or side panels. It also came in quite a bad condition. I’m going to have to fix it up. Leaky capacitors, dust everywhere, janky fan wiring (I left those mostly unplugged), and the fact the CPU fan isn’t even controlled by the board, but rather is plugged into a molex connector and runs at 100% all the time are most of the problems I’ve noticed with the thing.
It turned on, and appeared to be running a copy of Windows XP. I wiped the thing and installed my own copy. I haven’t done much testing yet, but antiX Linux also runs on it as well. I have also recently acquired a Parallel ATA to Serial ATA adapter so I can now plug a SATA SSD into a computer that’s this old. I did see a SATA power connector on the power supply, but no SATA port on the motherboard, probably due to its age.
Oh, and I did replace the coin cell batteries in most of my old computers, including this one. I ended up finding some for a very good price and as a result I now have mostly functioning time and date functions on these machines. It gets old having to enter the time and date in the BIOS each time I want to use one of these machines.
That giant tower next to my computer. I removed one of the CD drives from the giant tower since I needed it for another PC.
Inside the computer. No side panel was removed for this picture as the side panel is missing. It's not in great internal shape.