First post, by GXL750
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One of my drinking buddies gave me his old desktop today and actually seemed glad to have the thing gone. It was in interesting shape. The empty PCI slots that didn't have the metal cover piece had black tape over them and black tape was also used to fill in the empty space left by the lack of a cover plate to go around the motherboard's ports. CPU heatsink was missing it's fan (I remember two years ago, when I had to work on this computer for him, he had a household fan blowing into the computer) and the computer itself smelled like an ashtray. Also, the power supply was a Micro ATX type which was too small to mount where the PSU should go and was in the case suspended by the wires coming out of it.
It had two 160gb hard drives though one is flakey and only works sometimes, 1gb RAM but one of the two 512mb sticks was faulty, 2.26ghz Pentium 4 Northwood and an ASRock P4i65GV motherboard which is interesting for using the version of the Intel i865 chipset that lacked AGP support and has what ASRock calls an "AGI" slot that's compatible only with a limited number of AGP cards. On the plus hand though, the motherboard runs nice enough and seems stable. Also, it has 6 USB ports built in and enough headers for the 4 USB ports built into the case I moved the system to making for a total of 10. I'll never use that many at once but it's nice to know I'll never need a USB hub for this thing.
The computer is now in a smaller case with a proper power supply (the case came from a circa 2008 Acer I found outside with a dead mobo), the heatsink has a new, quiet running fan mounted on it, the bad hard drive and ram module have been removed and the computer is running a fresh install of Windows XP. The specs would have it pinned at being entry level 2003/04. It's sitting at my office desk now as a general use system/internet terminal until I can think of some use for it. I'm sure if my friend saw the computer now, he'd be surprised I was able to salvage it. The thing really was a piece of junk when I got it but can be called decent albeit dated now.