So I have a pretty shitty PC of my own, that's been serving me really well for the past 9 years; it's a Dell Inspiron (affectionately called the shitbox / the idiot box) with an old i3, 8 gigs of RAM and a hard drive with windows 10 home on it.
now don't get me wrong, the CPU and the 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 MHz RAM can hold their own pretty well even today*
oh dear asterisk, you have tracked me down again.
So windows 10 seems to have a ton of telemetry going on in tne background, and Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry can be found sucking up 30-50% CPU at any given time.
that's not a problem though, since there's a much bigger one:
anyone who has ever used a hard drive as a boot drive knows how painful it is, and as it turns out, windows absolutely hates hard drives: it would always be stuck at 100% usage with seek times in the thousands (if not tens of thousands) of milliseconsds. running anything on that was really painful. But it was still a useful PC. it was My PC.
until we had a brownout, and the PSU blew up.
so you know how it's a Dell pre-built? it's also small-form-factor, and the combination of these two led to the PSU (and the motherboard) being proprietary and not ATX/mATX/whatever.The problem with proprietary parts of any kind is that you have to go to the manufacturer for replacements.
of course, I can find it on ebay, but those are overpriced and come from sellers with very poor credibility, to be polite.
Or, I could try to buy a cheap no-name PSU (since calling the budget tight would be an understatement) and try to modify the connectors to fit the motherboard; but the PSU would have to live outside the case of the PC, since even an expensive SFX PSU would be too big to fit inside. now that's a fire hazard waiting to happen, and I'm not very comfortable with that.
one last option would be to salvage core components from the system that are not proprietary (like the CPU, the memory and stuff) and put it into a "new" case, a "new" H61 motherboard, and a cheap PSU to build a "new" PC with my old data in it (with hopefully the SSD upgrade coming soon, though this repair eats into the budget of that a lot).
I prefer this over scrapping the PC and buying a new one because it'll be significantly cheaper and I don't wanna throw away parts that work just fine for what I do (which is mostly writing webpages and surfing the internet and stuff); but the hassle and risk of such a transplantation job when I'm not 100% sure that the PSU didn't take the CPU, memory and hard drive with it makes this option also slightly iffy.
and i have no idea what to do. hopefully future me would've found a good solution and would laugh at this post thinking of the good old days when i would worry about small, irrelevant things. anyway, I have stuff to do and a ton of things to wrap up before I go to sleep, so I'll finish this post and tidy up the house.