A cautionary tale

One of my customers gave me his Fujitsu tower that was giving him trouble after I installed his new DELL. It was only a couple of years old and had a reasonable spec. So I thought that by replacing the scruffy old case with a new shiny black one (£16), an a extra stick of 1Gb DDR memory (£23), SATA DVD writer (£18) and a better 400W PSU (£17) should fix the problem and make it resaleable. I was wrong it continued to crash indicating that the strange Fujitsu version of an Asus motherboard (P5SD1-FM2) was the culprit. Interestingly this had been replaced just recently under the extended warranty but was still giving problems. It was an Intel socket 775 with DDR memory which is also a bit rare.

So I replaced it with a cheap Asrock motherboard (£31), and two sticks of 1Gb DDR2 memory (£35). Because the Windows XP installation was keyed to the old Fujitsu BIOS, it needed a new copy of Windows 7 (one of my preordered £45). The Intel Pentium 4 3Ghz CPU was a bit weak but at least the system worked reliably. All was well for a while, but I wasn't able to sell it.

Then another customer gave me an overheating DELL 5150C SFF computer with a passively cooled Radeon X600 graphics card and an Intel Pentium D 3GHz dual core CPU. I removed the graphics card and used the integrated graphics, but it still ran warm due to the powerful and hot CPU. I then decided to swap the CPUs in the two systems. The DELL accepted the single core Pentium 4 CPU without a murmur and was a lot cooler. Then I put the Pentium D onto the Asrock motherboard and mounted a good size Akasa fan (£10) on top to take care of the cooling. It ran for about 10 seconds just booting into Windows and stopped. No lights, no fan, no power and a faint acrid smell of burnt electronics.

I checked the power supply, no problem. So I'd blown the motherboard. Upon checking, the Pentium D 830 was not on the approved CPU list as the motherboards maximum TDP was just 105W. As are most cheap Socket 775 motherboards. Pentium D's are probably the CPUs with the highest TDP ever and are certainly way over 105W! So I have now bought another motherboard and CPU. This time an Asus KP5QPL (£38) and a new Intel Celeron E3200 CPU (£35) to get the computer going again.

My exploits have cost a total £268 and I'd have been better off if I'd have just bought a new, faster DELL with a warranty and be easier to resell. Let this be a lesson to us all that resurrecting an old system is often definitely not worth it.