When old PCs finally decide to die

Posted by Zach on November 03, 2024

I have an approximately 10 to 15 year old PC that I still use every day, it might even be in contention for the "daily driver" title if we're talking purely in terms of hours of use per day. Pretty impressive. It started out as a top of the line gaming/personal projects rig, and then shifted to a gaming/media center role for a few years while I focused on the work I was doing for the national center for missing and exploited children. Thinking back on it now, all of my "personal projects" at that time were for NCMEC so I used the laptop they gave me. I remember many times Shardé would ask me if I was "working for work or working for fun" and in those NCMEC days I could honestly answer "both" with a bit of a sheepish grin because of course I know what she really meant....but I digress.

A couple of years ago the old PC which I named Goken (suitable, being the strongest of all shoto users last I checked), finally got replaced with a new gaming rig. The motherboard was old enough that there was a critical vulnerability exposed that wouldn't be patched and thus made it incompatible with windows 11, so it was demoted once again to purely media center duties, with the occasional low poly gaming session thrown in. As long as I didn't try to play anything too new or high res I was able to game from my couch, the good times with Goken continued to roll. But it wasn't all good, and this is why I started to write this post. It seems like Goken knew that time was up. I know it's impossible for a collection of hardware components to know anything, but I swear Goken was fine before I brought in the replacement.

The first thing to go was the HDD (yes I'm still using old fashioned drives with magnets and spinning plates), no big deal since the only thing installed on there were a few games and the operating system. We were back up and running in a few days, but I noticed that the system just wasn't as responsive and snappy as it used to be. I couldn't really explain it, the task manager didn't look strange, I had plenty of ram and CPU, but the computer just overall felt slower. I chalked it up to the computer getting older, as one does, but that explanation has always bothered me.

I couldn't let it go so I pulled everything apart and tested each component individually in another computer until I found the culprit; it was the power supply unit. The PSU is something I usually install once and then never think about, ever, even when things go wrong. The best part is that a bad PSU will actively harm all of the other parts of your system so probably something I should keep a better eye on in the future. I was psyched to have finally solved the problem and finally have my PC back, Goken was back to being fast and responsive for basic tasks, but clearly struggled with games and worse, could seemingly no long handle 4k video. Shardé and I tried to watch John Wick 4 and I'm at the edge of my seat watching the warner brothers logo stutter into view, "just give it a bit", a tense whisper born from deep denial, "it's just buffering". A minute later my wife declared the movie unwatchable, and we only watched movies in 1080p, but I knew it was over for Goken. The bad power-supply had ravaged the once powerful gpu, I'm assuming the processor was impacted as well.

That was about two years ago, things continued to deteriorate, but I held out and fell back on various workarounds. At this point Goken is mainly being used to doomscroll social media from my couch, Kodi doesn't work but I can still watch 1080p video using media player classic. I've given up on gaming of all kinds, Goken engages all fans and does their best impression of a supercomputer calculating the next biggest prime number. It broke my heart to hear them struggling to keep the temperature down while I let Stellaris idle in the background.

I made do though, it's always hard for me to splurge on a big-ticket purchase of any kind, but especially computer hardware that's mainly just for me to use for fun. My wife solved that problem by offering to fund my next rig as a birthday present. She knew it was on my list of things to do/buy but was also aware of exactly how far down the list of priorities it was so it was really thoughtful of her to fund it herself so that I wouldn't have to wait until next year.

It's been a long time since I've built a PC for myself, I wanted to stay inside of $1200 bucks but then I saw that top of the line video cards these days go for almost a grand on their own 💰 so I ended up spending about $1600 on the new system. If I recall correctly I bought my very first PC for ~$1300 in 1996 and I've tried to stay in that range for all of my gaming PCs through the years. I checked and $1300 adjusted for inflation in todays dollars would be ~$2500 bucks. First of all I'm impressed that I could raise that kind of money from a paper route, my parents must have helped. But second that means that I sold myself short on my latest build 😁 next time I can probably be a little less cheap.

I clicked the buy button 6 days ago, and this past week has been really rough trying to use Goken, youtube is a struggle, I tried to run MusicBee and display the song lyrics and the cursor was 30 seconds delayed. The audio even skips sometimes...so what's next?

I'm not sure yet, my computers usually end their lives by becoming a new computer for some other purpose or person. Often I cannibalize parts from the previous rig in my next build. This might be one of those few rare occasions in my life where I have to trash a PC. So, a toast to an old computer, time to finally rest.