So, I had a desktop computer that I used for a while, and finally, I cleaned it up, and I'm ready to give it away to someone else
At some point between high school and university, my dad took me to a local computer business, owned by a friend of ours with a computer business. He got used office computers (probably from schools and companies), restored them and sold them online for personal use. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that powerful, mostly solid hardware, if a bit old, usually without a graphics card.
Anyway, my dad bought one for pretty cheap, thanks to the friendship discount, he even added some extra RAM for free, and replaced the HDD with an SSD.
I still remember, 4 sticks with a total of 24 GB of RAM, and 1 SSD with 128 GB of storage, Intel 7 2nd gen with integrated graphics. He also installed and NVIDIA Quadro graphics card, that would help for whenever I needed to use graphical programs such as AutoCAD or SolidWorks, and the many simulators I’d use for digital circuits, PLCs and the like.
It was a perfectly usable machine, I didn’t care or know much about hardware, and I had no job nor money to upgrade anything anyway. There were many things affecting the upgradeability of the desktop from the get go, but I wasn’t really aware of that at the time. I was just happy to have it, even if the issues were many:
Old hardware all around
It’s a slim one, so it needs slim graphic cards, if any.
Mixed RAM sticks from different brands, probably sizes too.
No HDMI ports, the motherboard only had VGA ones, and the other one that looks like an older VGA
The monitor was VGA only, 1366x768.
I needed a mini display port to VGA adaptor for the graphics card
Overall though, it was perfectly serviceable for everything I did on it, and I was rather content with it. It was even the first device where I tried Linux, installing Pop_OS! on it successfully! I think I had a spare SSD by then and that’s how I got away with it at the time. Eventually, since it was still the living room family computer that was used by not just me, I had to go back to Windows. Even today, the EFI partition still shows the rEFInd bootloader that I had installed at the time!
Today, I am getting rid of it, my mother offered it to a family friend whose children are going to the last grade of middle school, where they will start using more computer tools such as Word and PowerPoint. Once again, I won’t get away with a Linux install on this one.
There were a couple problems at first, since I couldn’t find a power cable, and I had lost the mini display port adaptor for VGA. After looking a bit more in my cable box, I decided to remove the graphics card and just use integrated graphics, and I found a cable to power the display. They are not using intensive programs anytime soon anyway.
After all that I managed to turn on the computer and setup a clean Windows 10 install. I got rid of all the clutter and bloat I could find, did a very legal installation of Microsoft Office 2016, and called it a day.
My old desktop after cleaning up Windows 10 and leaving just some essential programs installed.
Now it’s only a matter of waiting for them to pick it up, they’ll probably ask me for help to set it up at their house, shouldn’t be too difficult anyway. It may be an old machine, but I hope it can still work for a few more years for simple tasks and programs.
When I ordered some watches from Casio's official website, things didn't go well, so I ended up exchanging emails with their staff and worrying too much about it
