Very old parts what should i do?
Very old parts what should i do?
I’m meeting people here for the first time, but I’ve heard Linus discuss his forum for a long time. Now that I have some questions, I’m curious about joining and seeing what’s going on. My mom’s friend had a few old PCs that she wanted to get rid of, and I was suggested to help safely dispose of the drives so no data remains. After collecting them, I noticed two white models and one with a Windows 2000 license. I thought about sending them to a recycling center, but when I opened them, both had Gigabyte motherboards and AGP video slots—one even had an AMD CPU. I plugged in the Intel one, but it didn’t display anything. I tried the VGA cable on the Intel model and got nothing. When I cleaned the slot and rechecked, it still wouldn’t work. After testing both slots, it kept showing “Checking NVRAM.” I looked it up online and found a RAM error. Cleaning the slot helped once, but it kept returning to “Check NVRAM.” I tried the same with the other two slots, but the issue persisted. With these two options, I’m wondering if it’s worth buying and getting an AGP card or RAM from eBay for further testing, or if it’s better to let them go to the scrap yard. The AMD PC has a Gigabyte GA-7IXE rev1.1 and an AMD Athlon A0900mmr24b, while the Intel model came with a Gigabyte GA-8IPE100 Pro-G and a 3.2GHz Pentium 4.
Love experimenting with projects? Go for it. If you're after real value and profits, don't squander your time. Just get rid of them.
There's nothing weird about that AMD CPU, it's an original Athlon. They are notorious when it comes to RAM compatibility issues. Even down to specific brands, speeds and timings. If it's an SD RAM board it's not so bad but the DDR ones (which this looks like it is) are nightmares to get working stable. There's a cult following to old hardware, mostly nostalgic people like myself who have been hanging on to their old system pieces for decades and are looking to expand or replace defective pieces. As a matter of fact my friends and I are having a LAN in a couple months based around Windows XP hardware only and early 2000s games. Which is a throwback for us because that's what we did from 2002 to about 2010 for fun.
Usually only the most exceptional items hold value, especially those from their time. I know a friend with a Ti-994a expansion case—it was larger than an entire computer. The connection cable was so poorly shielded that a typical debugging method involved placing a radio nearby and listening for the hum it made. That’s quite rare. A truly premium piece would be something like a 4790k CPU. Not the 4770k. The absolute pinnacle. If you own any of these, you might be able to sell them on eBay. Otherwise, it’s likely you wasted the canned air.
I was considering just discarding the items, but it turned out to be worth checking. You never realize what someone might need, even if I don’t think I wasted my canned air. I had a good time experimenting with the stuff, and thanks for your response. I’ll probably play around with them a bit more =P