Made a visit to a local computer repair shop

Made a visit to a local computer repair shop.
Asked for the most bare-bones second hand shittiest computer he can sell me.

$13 dollars.
One of those old pentium processors
1 Gb of RAM
very old.

He asked me why out of curiosity..
I told him it's for a project, every now and then I'll buy a separate component and upgrade until it's really good.

I'm aware of compatibility issues like ddr3 and 4 with motherboards that do or don't support it for example.

Thing is:

He says you can't upgrade these old type of computers, you just won't find the right components for them.

But I'm really sure you can, it's just old that's all, you upgrade the motherboard, get a better display adapter or graphics card, new power supply..

I think he means all the components that come in the box will be old..
>Upgrade the RAM sticks
Motherboard too old

>Upgrade the motherboard
All connected components might be too old.

Help. What do I do here??
I'm thinking to try anyways, to get extra ram that's compatible and voila, more ram, then eventually a better motherboard that still supports the components, I think I can do it.

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What is the project, anyway?

That nigga doesn't know what he's talking about.

Buy new ram, ssd, CPU and literally throw it inside the case then shut the panel. Good to gow.

what a waste of time

Just look up the motherboard model and the best possible components you can install on it.

Well I TOLD him it's for a project

in reality i don't know what I'm going to use it for, I guess all of this can help me learn more about the hardware of things

You know, saying it's a waste of time is a waste of everyone's time, at least give a suggestion or some sort of advice :)

Sometimes buying compatible old shit pretty much as expensive as getting decent new shit

Slap a 2200G and a MSI mortar in the the thing and play some fortcraft-g

i'm getting components that are more up to date than the already existing ones, and the computer with all the existing components cost $13 so...

Sounds pretty cool user. I think you should continue with it. You might run into issues where the components you get don't have much life left in them but I think it will be worth it anyway

My server has a Pentium Pro. It is so old it predates the compulsory back doors.

Well you could kinda upgrade everything, but it feels like missing the point the point.
Put in new motherboard, new cpu, new ram and an ssd - all thats left is the old case

You can still buy ddr ram and pre lga775 CPUs. I'm sure you can upgrade it easily. Not hard to get a 771 converted to 775 and 4-8gb of ram for some 775 pc for example. What socket is it even running?

You know, you sound pretty cool, i'll tell you, i'm getting the computer for my little brother, I had one when I was a kid, I want him to have one too, but his first computer will have linux on it, not many games to play, so he'll be growing up with a real computer :), get used to the shell and learn about computers.

So you bought a case for 13$. That's alright I guess.

yeah.. you know.. I think the dude told me I can't upgrade because all he does is repair, i really don't consider him a computer enthusiasts, just refurbishing computers for the money..

the thing that really makes me think this is the place I live in, people don't really know anything about computers so he can say any price he wants, they can't tell if it's worth the cost or not

It's really not hard to upgrade shit as long as it's post pentium 3 these days.

If you're going to gut it, why not buy new hardware right away and skip the step where you end up getting stuck with ancient crap and a shit case?

if you intend to upgrade to really new hardware at ANY point, it's a money sink. Not to mention those slim computers have proprietary non-standard psu's and motherboard layouts, and usually only support low-profile pcie cards (gpu's for example) by default.

This, if you're uograding the motherboard you might as well leave all the internals at the shop, except maybe the psu, it's like buying a case.

Of course you can max out the pc with compatible components with the old board but I doubt you can get half decent specs like that.

But if you just want to gain some experience building a pc this is a cheap way to do it, maybe with a lightweight linux distro you can make it usable for some basic stuff - if nothing else, learning about linux

Even a 775 is still capable of light gaming (eSports titles meme) and browsing shit. It will shit all over the celeron netbook grandma uses, aka it's good enough for those kinds of users.

True, I wish the best of luck to OP, post what you made.

You won't be able to run a decent graphics card, even though the motherboard has the right slot.

We've barely started to saturate pcie 2.0

1. Buy old shitty computer
2. Replace all the old shitty components
3. Have better computer

Why the fuck would you bother with the middle step? Just buy some reasonable second-hand components to begin with and throw it all in a box.

It's not just that it's old, on the old shit stations they often times use proprietary mounting points or connectors or solder components together. Making them worthless to upgrade. Because they stopped making that proprietary connector or motherboard.

>He says you can't upgrade these old type of computers, you just won't find the right components for them.
The guy is basically right. You have socket changed regularly and the DDR3 vs 4 RAM issue that you're already aware of. You're stuck with old backward CPU and likely RAM. Nothing changes that.
Two things which don't get outdated really are HDDs and GPUs (unless you game off course).

Did you try just grabbing something someone was just going to throw out / recycle anyway? Like really I got a free old iMac with a core2duo in it and I didn't even have to pay for it. It's worse than my pretty old PC system now but it still has some potential in it to play around with. Like I put a dual boot of linux in it so now it's able to do a fairly modern browsing experience.

Should've bought at least a Core2Duo deom ebay oe something. At least that has more accessible hardware

ok this is epic and basepilled

Would you buy a 1995 CRT monitor and say you are going to attache the best components to it to upgrade?

that is what you are doing, at some point you are just buying something that is not going to be worth upgrading. That motherboard/chipset is not worth attaching anything to. By the time you end up fucking with it it will still be slower than a rasberry pi and twice as expensive

Are you the guy who posted a thread about the free imac earlier? What are you using it for? What distro did you put on it?

If he's learning about building stuff it's better to fuck up a 10 dollar machine than a thousand dollar rig. Plus it can still be useful for lightweight stuff

Depend on what you got, considering it's an old pentium (and i mean the NetBurst ones) if the Mobo has PCIe instead of AGP then you're blessed, most of those mobos can't go over 4gb ram (some even cap at 2gb) and probably all are DDR (DDR2 in the beeeest case if they were 775), but if the mobo is a 775 with DDR2 (like a G43/P45 or even something older like a G33/P35) you can easily put a Q8/9xxx CPU, 4gb ram in dual channel and a cheap current GPU like a GT 1030, then that thing not only will run recent games (in shit resolution and not over 30fps, but it's something) but it's great as a media center, and also it can handle PS2/Gamecube emulators just fine.

If it's for servers, those mobos (P35/45) came with 16 PCIe lines but no onboard video, but just using the x1/4 for video and the rest for a PCIe sata expansion + the 4/6 sata ports should be enough for a home server, just remember those were Sata 2 at best, most had Gigabit ethernet onboard so you shouldn't need a card for that, but they're also only USB 1.1/2.0 so any external would work slow as shit.

finding a psu that fits in ur case will be a bitch.

>buy old shit for 13 bucks
>upgrade everything because everything is shit
Congratulations, you just bought an old PC case for 13 bucks.

Can you overclock it in the Bios?

In reality he’ll probably never use it because it is too much trouble, and will grow up with zero exposure to computers and be technically illiterate his entire life

Nah I haven't started a thread at all today. At the moment I have xubuntu. I was seeing that xfce was better for older hardware?