Lil' Mule

The Little Mule: A Legacy PC

I found on local classifieds one day an Asus MOBO with an included core 2 duo CPU. The guy wanted 20 bucks. So I met up with him and bought it. After accumulation of a few more parts I took it to a friend's and we did a system re-build for his old PC. I took all his old hardware in exchange for the new hardware. I didn't originally plan this, it just came to me when I realized that I really did NEED another Core 2 Duo PC... seeing as how I was currently working one 2. So I set him up with a nice PC. Stripped out all the old, plugged in all the new. I forget the actual stats, but its a core 2 duo, a 2.8 ghz I believe with at least 3 GB of ram (DDR2) probably around the 600MHz speed. And a Geforce 9800 512mb Video Card. When all was said and done he was running Black Mesa on medium to high settings. Which was really our goal when we started because Half-Life, to us, is lesson number one in a proper video game appreciation course.

 Ready for transplant

 Transplant complete!

The Little Mule Begins

His old hardware sat in my bin-o-parts for several months. The core I3 I did for my wife came out of this stupid old case that I started off hating. I nearly tossed it out at one point. Then I figured “what the heck, I can have a full running computer with these parts, why not?” and I began a build for a Legacy PC. I figured having an old PC around would be great so I could play my old favorite PC games again.

I got everything into the case and running and was nostalgic when windows XP booted up. (I happened to find an authentic copy of WinXP too!) One of the things I tried with it was windows 95 (because I also have an authentic copy of that old crap!) and I attempted to play Daggerfall. I can't say it was a success because the game was all glitchy and unplayable, but it wasn't a failure either because the game installed, loaded, and ran. You just couldn't kill the first bat thing you came across because it thought the attack button was the pickpocket button. Anyway, I scrapped the idea and went to XP thinking that DOSBOX or legacy mode would play it better. (I actually haven't even tried it yet... I got a bit distracted)

I hated how long boot time was, and how so much junk loaded at startup and the general sluggishness of the PC so I found online a link: https://law.wustl.edu/computersupport/help/Instructions/Optimize%20WinXP/How%20to%20optimize%20Windows%20XP%20for%20the%20best%20performance.htm and I went through it. Now my PC looks like windows 95 but it runs like a champ! Boot time was reduced, and applications loaded faster, general PC usage and navigation was faster and smoother. I couldn't care less about all the fancy “upgraded” looks of XP so optimization for speed was just the ticket. 

 I use SpeedFan and OpenHardwareMonitor to veiw the status of my PC's hardware and to find any problems, or potential problems. For example, my HDD was running almost twice as hot as my CPU. I was able to set the perfect fan speed for the CPU's cooler so that I get good performance without too much noise. The temps in the case were also unreasonably high. I decided that some case modding was in order as well as something had to be done about that HDD.

The front of the case had little tiny vent holes. Pathetic. I drilled them out bigger! Now it can actually intake! Then I pasted and zip-tied a heatsink onto the biggest chip on the HDD. That dropped it's temp by a few degrees. Then I popped out the bay cover for the slot above and it dropped another few degrees. I found a little fan from an old Pentium 3 cooler and rigged it up to blow over the HDD, the temps dropped even further. Feeling empowered with air cooling brilliance I thermal pasted an old CPU cooler onto the top of the HDD and fastened it down with a zip tie and found another P3 cooler fan from another stack of old computers I was given and drilled some more vent holes for good measure. I had to move the restart button and eliminate one of the front panel LEDs but I don't need that bizz anyway. That HDD became the coolest componenent in the entire case! Feeling satisfied with the air cooling performance I began using the PC for all sorts of things. I play old games, I have my library of E-books on here, when I do data recovery for the people who give me their old PC's I use this computer and burn their data on to CDs or DVDs with it. It will pop out a full Data DVD in about 7 minutes. I'mm sure new and faster machines could do it much faster but I am very satisfied with this old tech doing everything I need it to do.

In fact the PC I put together for my wife was doing this weird thing where it would constantly freeze for several seconds. It made it nearly impossible to do anything on. You'd move the mouse toword where you want to click and it would freeze. A moment later it would be back and you'd lost your cursor, typing was unreal because you never knew if it was keeping up with you. I did some research and decided I had better check the HDD. Sure enough, after a ScanDisk I found a bunch of bad sectors. I got a new hard drive order. Then I tried to repair that HDD. My wife's laptop, a fairlew Toshiba with 8.1 wouldn't format it. My older Toshiba laptop with Ubuntu wouldn't format it. I couldn't even get the windows 7 install disk to format it and when trying to start fresh! So as a last effort I hooked it up via USB adapter to this old PC. It was formatted in a couple hours and had zero bad sectors! By now the new HDD and arrived and I got the wife's PC up and running again, but now I have a spare HDD for it or one of my other projects. From then on I named this PC the Little Mule. It may not do it fast, but it get's it done. This old thing has been able to handle everything I've thrown at it.

So when I installed XP on the Lil' Mule I did it 

next to Ubuntu on the same HDD. I made a 3^rd partition on the same same Hard drive with the idea that I would try other Linux versions there. So my XP partition quikly ran out of space with me loading old PC games and tons of e-books, and when doing Data recoveries for people I would move the wanted date to my PC's hard drive prior to burning onto disks so I wanted to keep enough space free for those sorts of things. XP can't recognize the other partitions on that HDD so I needed a second one. With all that mess set up for the first HDD I hate to get a bay adapter for the second one to mount up in a 5.25” drive bay and it turned out that the ribbon cable was a few inches too short to reach. It was about then I decided to max this thing out. I got on amazon and ebay and had 3 Gbs of 400mhz ram on it's way with a ribbon cable extention in no time, and shortly after that I had a 512 Video card on it's way with the fastest CPU AMD made for socket A, the Athlon XP 3200+. (go ebay! ) Currently, the ram is installed and the second HDD is up and running, I formatted it this morning. I have several spare PATA 80GB HDD's so I didn't have to buy an old HDD.

So, Starting specs were:

MOBO: Asus A7N8 2.0

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2100 @1.1Ghz

1.5GB RAM @400mhz

GPU: Radeon 9800 256mb

350W PSU

HDD 120GB @7200rpm

ROM1 DVD RW/CD RW

ROM2 CD RW

3.5” Floppy

Now they will be:

MOBO: Asus A7N8 2.0

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3200 + @2.2Ghz

3GB RAM @400mhz

GPU: Radeon x1550 XGE 512mb

350W PSU

HDD1 120GB @7200rpm

HDD2 80GB @7200rpm

ROM1 DVD RW/CD RW

ROM2 CD RW

3.5” Floppy

I want a more powerfull PSU with more power rails, a fan controller, and a 5.25” drive bay fan module to cool the second HDD. So it's still a work in progress but it's my little mule!

The Wife's Tower

I magically scored an Intel Core I3 CPU and MOBO to go with it.  It was in this awful old case and was FULL of dust.  I had a 30 dollar mATX case on the way in no time (that included a 420W PSU!)

2.9GHZ Core i3

Size comparison of the mATX next to the MkIV (Full ATX) 

 Scored an awesome wireless keyboard with track-pad refurbished from NewEgg

The massive intake fan helps the stock Intel Cooler out a bit.  (Though the stock cooler totally sucks and I will be upgrading it eventually)

You can charge your phone off the front USBs even when the PC is turned off, I think that's pretty nifty!  It's also wirelessly connected to my network.

I also landed a fabulous deal on a Zotac GeForce 630 video card and I can play Black Mesa on Steam at maximum quality!

The wife still prefers to use her handy-dandy laptop, but this little tower is a beast of a backup.

MKIV Continues...

I found a guy on the local classifieds selling a crappy looking tower for cheap.  But when I saw a pic of the inside I knew I HAD to have it.

 An ASUS PQ5 Pro Turbo?!

And a GeForce 9800?!














Got a killer deal on a complete PC with awesome components.  The guy said he had a few and was "just trying to get rid of them"

 I had it cleaned up and ready in no time.

 And the MkIV was torn all apart to make way for this gem.

It came together nicely.

 Ready to wire it all up

Assembled and functioning.

Another computer massacre complete.

I ran it this way for some time until I overwhelmed the powersupply with components and fans and it didn't want to work anymore.  I figured that if I need a new PSU I will be getting a nice modular one.  And so it currently sits, unused, waiting for that time, slowly assimilating components as other old computers roll in and out.  In fact, it actually got a CPU upgrade while it's been sitting: from a Core 2 Duo 2.8ghz to a 3.1ghz.  If only I could get my hands on a 3.0ghz Core 2 Quad...

Mk IV begins

The MK IV

In the aftermath of the MK3 I found a Core 2 Duo CPU. Using this CPU I set out to build myself a PC.

I wanted a case with cooling options, cable management and bottom mounted PSU. I wanted a motherboard that would support a lot of RAM. I wanted the best CPU cooler I could afford.

I got a nice MSI Combo MOBO on it's way and searched for a suitable case.  The case was kind of an accident.  I was look for mATX size for the motherboard, and when I found the case I ordered it was listed as an mATX because it was compatible with that motherboard size, but I didn't pay enough attention to realize it was a full ATX size.   

So when the case arrived I becan to put everything I had at the time together.

I was was just jimmy-rigging it together just wanting to to run as soon as possible.  And since it had so many HDD spaces I tossed all of them in there just so they would have a place to be.

 I really liked being able to tie up and hide most of the wiring, but it makes for a little bit wider of a case.

My massive cooler arrived, the upgrade to the one I used on the MK3.

 Got an amazing deal on a BluRay ROM

The cooler barely cleared everything.  Except the side panel fan.  Too tall for that one.

Fan installed

 BluRay installed

Complete (in its first form)

As it sat it was a pretty remarkable computer. Without a video card I was watching Youtube in HD and it was playing DVDs better than my BluRay player. I attempted a RAM upgrade but failed. The motherboard was a COMBO meaning it could use two types of RAM, though not symultaniously. Also the DDR3 it accepted was only DRAM, and I bought SDRAM. Up until now I didn't even know there was a difference. I learned a great deal about RAM from this. So I returned the RAM I bought and decided to leave it as it was for now.

I used it like this for a while.  Then one day I came across something amazing that would take this PC to it's next form.

To be continued.

The MK3

The Mark 3.

I had been collecting more parts and finally got some stuff I though I could upgrade the MK2 with and then accidentally destroyed it.  I don't even know what happened.  I couldn't get any of that old hardware to work.  It was all just fried.  Can't find my photos of it...

 

MK3 was already in the works by this time and I had planned for it to be my PC so it got re-planned as MK2's replacement.  It started with an old case and a Core 2 Duo.

I got it up and running like this and was very dissatisfied with the poor cooling performance.  It was also pretty heavy and a pain to move around.

So I added caster wheels.

It had a 7.1 sound card in it, but the outputs were all weird so I got a 5.1 with Digital Optical because I know that would hook in to the theater's sound system without a problem.

Then I upgraded the CPU cooler to a level of ridiculous.

 New RAM and a PCI slot mounted fan finished off the hardware.

All that was left was to tidy it up and install an OS.

I became obsessed with airflow and air cooling while building this tower... you'll see more of that in later builds.  Cool hardware runs better and lasts longer.

The airflow is so good that the CPU would stay at about 5 degrees above room temperature during load.  My dad bought a copy of Win7 and it's been serving in his theater ever since.

Here we see the MK3 in the aftermath of cannibalizing yet another donor computer.

I believe 6 computers gave their best hardware to assemble this single tower.

Final Specs: 

Asus P5BW-LA MOBO, Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.133Ghz, 2x 200GB HDD, Asus 210 GPU 1Gb, DVDRW x2, 4gb DDR2 RAM.

End.

Intro

My friends and family are aware of my hobby with old computers.  Many people have donated their old junk to the cause and I have turned out a couple worthy projects.  Here will be a documentation of those projects.

I was always playing with the family computer when I was a kid and sometimes screwing it all up.  I remember one time when I got Scorched Earth to run on our Windows 95 PC off a floppy disk and somehow it reset the computer's boot sequence and it wouldn't start Windows anymore.  It would only boot to the game if the disk was inserted.  Neither me or my dad knew anything about the BIOS and setting boot priority so we couldn't fix it.  Needless to say my dad was pretty mad.  Computers weren't cheap and I just wrecked ours.  He took it somewhere and it came back fixed.  Can't remember if I was grounded or not...

I had typing classes in elementary school and Jr. High.  The elementary school computers ran some kind of Basic and the screens were black with yellow text.  The Jr. High ones were modern and sported windows 95 or 98 and we practiced proper typing.  I got to be decent.  Though not much of it stuck because I still don't type with my hands in the proper positions.  I type how is most comfortable to me.  I also had a basic computer class where we learned basics of internet and word and common applications.

In Highschool I had a tech class every year, the first year we rebuilt some old Pentium 3's the school had stashed away and I learned how to install windows with a boot floppy and how all the components go together.  The following years we learned other programs like Flash and AutoCad.

I once had our old Pentium 3.  It was pretty old and useless so I attached all the hardware to a piece of plywood just to see if it would still function and it did, but it was hideous, and big, and as mentioned: useless.

Ha!  I found a picture of it.

My dad gave me our Pentium 4 one day.  I could finally build something useful.  I churned out the "Frankenputer" and gave it back to my dad to use as a media server for his home theater.

It had a good airflow and practically sounded like a jet engine when it was on.  I was shorted USB headers by the motherboard so the front USBs didn't work.  Didn't realize at the time I could have solved that issue with a USB PCI card.
I didn't put any money into this thing and it worked well for a several years.  One day I tried to upgrade the motherboard and CPU to some AMD hardware I scored and I somehow ruined both it and the P4.  the Mark 2 Frankenputer was no more.  It was while building a replacement for this tower, dubbed "Mk3" that I really started learning from what I was doing.  I figured that if I really can build a half-decent computer for almost no cost, then why not?








I will be posting more in the future about my computerey projects I have undertaken including current projects.  Most of what I do depends on what I have on hand.  All my other hobbies are so expensive I figure I gotta have one that's free.

The End.