I can't believe it still works! Putting life back into old tech.

For a good few years I've had an old PC shoved behind the door in my study. Hidden away enough to forget, but not so much as to not stub a toe on occasionally! I've been trying to think about when I built it and it must have been around 2011/12. It was my primary machine for a few years but has pretty much been in storage since we moved in 2017. I'm not sure it was used much for a few years before then.

Yesterday I had the urge to see if it still worked.

Now for context this old thing has been shoved in the loft, spent some time in the garage, generally it has been through every "no no" for something electronic. I'm not going to lie, I didn't have much hope. As you can see by the rather disgraceful covering of dust, bits hanging off and dents - it has seen better days.

Surprisingly, although it didn't load anything due to the disks being scavenged sometime in the past, it turned on without setting me on fire. I say turned on, the fans started and the motherboard displayed lights in the right areas. That led me to whipping it down to its component parts, digging out an old hard disk, giving it a quick clean and putting everything back.

Would you believe it, it only bloody works!

I managed to do a test run with the hard disk I had but it was far from brilliant so I ordered a cheap SSD that got delivered today. This post now comes from a battered old PC that seems jolly stable after being kicked about for over 10 years.

In my early IT days we were told about the dangers of static and touching components. These things are a bit tougher than I thought!

Also, for the first time in a 29 year career in IT, I had to change a BIOS battery!

Specs.

Intel i5 2500k
16GB RAM
512GB SSD
512GB HDD
NVIDIA GTX 460
Battered and dented case
...a sprinkle of magic.