Fixing your PC Follow

Just reading your post makes me tired. I don't have the energy to do all of that. One instance of me wasting money, but feels worth it.

Yea.. looking into encryption, but the worst thing you can do for a potential hacker is to provide a challenge.

P@$$w0rd!! - ha. see if he can figure that out.

Which brings us neatly a philosophical debate whether your PC is in fact your first ( quotes omitted, because why not ) PC? And if not, at which point did it become a new PC?

A hacker isn't going to be able to decrypt it and fix it before you expect it back. Unless your decryption password is Password, or something.

Right, they'd just copy it because it probably has something interesting and then leisurely crack it long after returning it to you. Just don't bring your disk to someone else for any reason unless they have information you don't care about on them. Not complicated.

Joke's on them when they spend a week brute-force cracking my old Dragon Age Origins saves and mp3's of mid 90s girl bands.

They can't fight the seether, but they probably are cannon balls so they might shoot you with their bright yellow gun. To be fair "spend a week" is one command line entry and then doing other things. Not really a lot of effort involved.

What it comes down to is treating my home pc like my work pc, which I don't necessarily like, but is the trade off for being lazy. It wouldn't be that big of a deal if I had thought of that BEFORE putting my stuff everywhere on my PC. I'm patiently waiting for Windows 10 to get another PC anyway, I'll start off right this time. In the mean time, I'm having to get rid of unnecessary sensitive information.

Dude, DDR3 came out in 2007. It might be time to upgrade your system

Meh, at this point I might just wait till DDR4 develops a wider consumer implementation. Won't be the first time I've skipped entire generations of tech.

My current tower is an old Dell XPS that used to have 2 Nvidia 8800, now has one 580. But it has an old processor (cannot remember the exact type, but is a dual core 2.26GHz if I remember right). 8GB Ram max for the motherboard. If I were to update that PC, I'd need a new Motherboard and Power Supply. At that point though I'd probably just be buying stuff for a new tower and recycle the graphics card. I think the 580 still has some life in it compared to more recent cards.

Um... Which is exactly the point I'm making.

Yeah, I guess if I proved how little I knew about the topic I was lecturing on, I'd make up a story about how it was an accident that I just intentionally didn't correct as well to prove some point.

"Predictable"!

To be fair, I work on a lot of HP workstations at work. I can pull almost everything and replace them without even using a tool. Except the cpus and the boards. These require tools and take a hell of a lot more time. Pretty equivalent amounts of time. The difference being that if I pull the entire board with cpus and memory and swap it out for an entire board/cpu/memory trio from a known working system, it's done and takes about the same amount of time it would take to replace one cpu. And that may or may not be the problem. Um... But that's not what I'm basing my argument on. I just point it out as a reference point. While these are not typically used for home computing, they're also a far cry from appliances. Again, I mention this only to respond to your "I've never seen any design" comment.

Even on a home computer, unless you intentionally purchased a really crappy/small case, it's really easy to remove the main board. A few screws on the bottom/side (which means that nothing blocks them because they're on the side that no components are attached to), unclip maybe 3 or 4 cables, and pull it out (probably not in that order). Put new board in the same spot. ***** it in. Re-attach the cables. Done. Takes like 5 minutes and has about zero chance of breaking anything.



Yeah. You have to remove the fan. Which also requires removing the fan power cable (which is often a pain by itself). Then unscrewing several screws, which are inevitably in difficult to reach spots, sometimes with difficult to find/release clips or covers. Every fan designer seems to have his own idea of the "best way" to attach a fan to a heatsink. Then comes the fun of releasing the cpu lever and replacing the cpu. This is admittedly not the pain that it once was (bent pins no longer the issue it once was). Assuming you have a well designed socket, this isn't too terrible, but if the board is "old", that may also not be the case. Then you have to re-attach the new heatsink and fan assembly. Which again, can be a pain in the butt.



No, it does not. I don't think I've ever had a board or case that required this. Easily the last 3 home computer upgrades I did, involved simply purchasing an already assembled trio of board/cpu/memory, and just replacing the existing board in the case in one piece, and then plugging the existing cables for my components and PS into the new board. Sometimes this also requires replacing the PS as well, if power requirements have changed.



Only if you started out with a really tiny and/or custom constructed case. For the last three decades, I have always purchased the most basic large cases with removable panels on all sides. Very simple. Actually very inexpensive as well. And a snap to remove/replace all components within. And this makes it much easier to replace things that attach to the case itself. That may be what's coloring my perspective because for me it's easy to remove stuff within the case itself (like the mainboard) because there's plenty of room inside. The connections between the board and the components on the board (specifically the cpu) is where the pain always is for me.

This isn't the early 90s anymore. There are literally only maybe 4 cables you have to connect between the board and the case. One power/communication connector. And then 1-3 drive connectors (SATA or SAS). That's it.



I just suspect our experiences are different. In my professional life, I'm always working with high end workstations where they are designed to be swapped out in whole chunks. At home, I've always endeavored to follow the same model because to me it makes the most sense. If, as I do, you purchase your board/cpu/memory as a single component, then it's easy to just drop it into a case as one piece. And because you did this when you built the system, it's trivial to remove the same trio later and swap it with a new one. Just pull the PCI cards off, pull the main cable bundle, then pull the drive cables. At this point, you've completely disconnected your board from the rest of the computer. Now it's just a few easy to reach screws and you're done. Repeat the process to but the new board in.


The reason I advocate this method is that it allows you to gain far more benefit for the buck. I've found that for quite some time (probably about 15-20 years now), trying to upgrade memory and cpu on a board just isn't worth it. By the time the amount/speed I purchased initially is no longer cutting it (or is failing), the upgrade options available that will still be compatible with the mainboard I've got are nearly meaningless relative to the increase gained if I replace the trio as a set. Most of the time, the reason you need to upgrade the board is because the old board no longer supports some newer memory and cpus. I just don't see the logic in spending a hundred bucks on a cpu that is maybe 15% faster than the 5 year old cpu I had before, when I could spend $300 on a total new trio of board/cpu/memory that will be 200% faster as a whole than what I've got. And it'll support new features that the old board didn't. And it'll provide upgrade paths for things like my video card and peripherals as well.


And yes, if you do this, you'll find that fiddling with the cpu and heatsink is a pita relative to just swapping out the board.

Edited, Mar 27th 2015 7:31pm by gbaji