Today’s post is late in part because my desktop overheated (again) and refused to boot. The last time it overheated the USB ports refused to work until the next morning. This time it wouldn’t recognize the hard drives. This points to a failing chipset (part of the motherboard). After 8 years it’s time to upgrade.
For most people this would be a time consuming and expensive situation. They would have to take their computer to a repair shop, pay for diagnostics, wait a few days for the results, then get ripped off by the repair shop assuming they can even find the problem. God help you if it’s an Apple product. You have to drive to an Apple store, which may be quite a drive if you don’t live in a big city, ship the entire computer off to Timbuktu, hope and pray they don’t erase the hard drive (they will), then pay $1200 to fix a broken fan because apparently the concept of interchangeable parts is lost on Apple.
For me, this was mildly annoying. I opened the case with two thumb screws. Everything is easily accessible in custom built computers; there are no proprietary plastic shrouds or weird sheet metal puzzle assemblies. Since it gave an error on the hard drives, I tried plugging them into different SATA ports. Not being penny-pinched proprietary OEM junk, my motherboard had 6 SATA ports. Two of them happened to work. The machine booted up but froze a few minutes later. This confirmed that the hard drives were fine and the motherboard was indeed dying.
If the situation was urgent I could drive down to Fry’s, Best Buy, Microcenter, or the local computer parts store to get fully compatible replacement parts. Waiting a few days to get parts from Newegg.com provides better selection and lower prices. Best Buy would still have been cheaper than a repair shop. Pre-built computers are often designed in ways incompatible with standard computer parts. Some of this is to save money, some of it is for style reasons, and some of it is to prevent repairs so you have to buy a whole new machine. Not on a custom machine; everything is standard, everything is replaceable. For me this meant I only had to buy a new processor, motherboard, and ram to repair and upgrade the system to 2017. Everything else could be reused.
Installing the new parts will take about half an hour. Any problems can be fixed immediately without making a trip to the repair shop or waiting for them to open tomorrow morning. If you’re a business it’s worth it to build custom computers from the perspective of reduced downtime alone. Shipping a computer off for repairs (looking at you, Apple fanatics) is unacceptable when each hour of downtime costs you $75+ in labor, not to mention projects falling behind schedule.
Over the last 8 years I had to replace two power supplies, one video card, and one hard drive. All of them lived a reasonable lifetime for what they were. I also added more ram because of how bloated the web has become. Combined, it probably cost around $350. The computer itself only cost $700 to begin with. How much have you spent over the last 8 years on computers? This machine had equivalent power to a $1200 PC or a $1600 Mac when it was built. Probably a bit more, since it had a decent video card as opposed to the junk they put in OEM machines.
Some people get caught up on “warranties”. First off, Mr. Baby Boomer, no warranty is worth it anymore. Sure, they’ll pay for the parts and labor but you’re without a computer for a month while they ship it off to some central repair center. Second, many things are not covered by computer warranties and the official repair centers make every effort to classify your problem as one of them. Third, components you buy to build a computer are each warrantied themselves. You only have to send in the one bad part too, not the entire machine and all your data. Fourth, computer parts either work or they don’t. If it runs on the second week it’s going to last as long as it was designed to, which is usually just past the warranty expiration. Fifth, and most important, when you build a computer you can choose all high quality components. When you buy a computer it’s going to be full of cheap, low-quality, low-power, overstocked garbage from last generation. Notice how I got 8 years out of my machine? Try that with an HP.
With age the desire to build top end gaming rigs fades. A moderately fast CPU with a bunch of ram will do everything I need for another 8 years. Hopefully Ryzen chips last that long. Next time you are at the store, even in the future, see how much a 3.2Ghz 6-core desktop with 32GB of DDR4-2666 costs. I only paid $620 and a hour of my time.
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