My madness must have reached a new maximum. For no reason I decided trying to reactivate an old PC. The motherboard, ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe, once had been the basis for my main PC. Bought about 2006 and upgraded over time it ended up with 8GB DDR2 RAM and 4*2TB HDD with a hardware RAID5 controller.
When the thing became a little unreliable and dated (no hardware AES, too little RAM) I had the computer shop build a new one in my old case retaining HDDs, optical drive and weak graphics card (which was later replaced by an overpowered1 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti in the new computer).
Since then the motherboard containing an Athlon X2 6000+ CPU and the PSU had been lying in a box for be resurrected at some point. Time surely flies… I never did anything with it but also took the RAM out for usage in a similar, a little weaker system.
Much of my really old electronics has failed over the years. I’m unable to repair them but also not willing to throw away certain things like old IBM-XT, which are a piece of history even in broken state.
The Old PC Case
Not of worth anything for the sake of keeping in “little private museum” is a Pentium II based computer that gave up the ghost a while ago. For personal reasons I do not want to share here, the worthless case has some sentimental value which is why I didn’t throw it away despite it was in remarkable bad condition from the outside. So I grabbed a spray can and sprayed the removable housing parts in gray. Not good, but way better than before.
Combing old with even older
Now we have a good motherboard/CPU lying around since almost a decade and a braindead computer. I decided to give the mad idea of building up something slightly more modern inside the case a try. Looking at the connectors of the Pentium II motherboard and comparing them to the ASUS left no hope: No chance of fitting this in unless cutting off all the metal at the back to create one giant opening. Looks horrible. But at least I could mount the board.
The old and small tower case was not built for such components. The HDD cage can no longer be inserted due to the huge CPU cooler. In truly idiotic manner I hot glued the cage to the bottom instead.
To prevent the newly inserted, way more powerful components from heating themselves to death I had to install case fans. Front made no problem: Big 120mm fan fits. For the backside I would have needed a very small one – which I don’t have lying around here. Buying stuff for a PC built out of junk parts is out of question. Enter slightly too big fan and single huge Spax screw… works.
Complete current specs
General Hardware:
- ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
- Athlon X2 6000+
- 4*1GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
Drives:
- 120GB SSD (cheap Intenso)
- WD2003FYYS RAID Edition (2TB HDD)
- LG GDR 8162B (can dump GC/Wii disc)
- Lite-on SOHR-5239V CD-RW (good at starting TwinPeak copies)
- Pioneer DVR-220RS (rather modern DVD drive)
- Legacy 1.44MB floppy
The end…?
Not quite. Last thing I want to mention is the BIOS update. There is support for flashing a new version right from BIOS without having to boot a DOS based operating system. Very modern! I downloaded the latest stable version, put it on a FAT32 formatted flash drive and started “ASUS EZ Flash 2” utility from the BIOS. Guess what: Error message. No matter what version I tried it always said, “No boot signature was found in the file!”
What the f… is that supposed to mean!? What is the BIOS trying to tell me?
- Checksum error/corrupted file?
- Wrong file for the board?
- Cannot read file?
None of these possibilities! It wanted to say: “Put the damn file on a floppy disk!” Version 1701 installed right away from floppy disk (the v1804 in the picture above is a beta).
I guess it just didn’t like my flash drive.
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- Yes, this was overpowered for my area of application. I don’t game on PCs. ↩︎