Is it worth it to salvage parts from an old build?

[jcitron]

After a rather frustrating weekend, I wonder if it was worth salvaging older parts when rebuilding a computer system. We think we're saving a customer money or ourselves money and time, however, I'm not sure this is the case. I chock this one up as a lesson learned after putting together a new rig for myself a few months ago.

This past weekend was a totally frustrating hell. When I built my new PC a few months ago, I carried over my case, with the power supply, and hard disks which I was using before. Perhaps I should have spent the extra dough up front and got new drives and a power supply, but why would I have to? They all seemed to be working well at the time, and had never given me a problem before. Anyway, the system kept crashing while in Trainz, which is a very graphic and CPU intensive program. I initially thought it was bad video drivers, DirectX versus Open/GL, etc., I updated to the latest ones for NVidia, which didn't help so I reinstalled Trainz, and everything ran fine afterwards. Then last Friday, while in the middle of editing a session, my system rebooted! Huh? What!? I checked the Event Viewer and saw nothing. There was no mention of what happen, which means that the OS didn't have a chance to write anything to the event log. This is not a good thing because it makes finding the problem more difficult. It seems that when problems strike, I get the nasty ones.

After that reboot, I then went back into Trainz and everything was fine for the rest of the day. Saturday was fine until later in the evening when the system rebooted again on me while on the web. At this point, I thought there was a script virus. Those nasty ActiveX script bugs that cause browsers to lock up and systems to reboot. I ran a virus scan and saw nothing. I ran multiple products, and my system was clean. I even ran some rather esoteric root kit scanners, and still found nothing! Figuring there was a RAM problem, I then ran Memtst86 for memory errors. After running for over 10 passes, overnight, nothing was found. From what I've read, and experienced, if the test passes for at least 7 cycles, then it's a pretty good chance that the RAM is good.

Sunday, I was in Outlook, and the system locked. The boot drive started chattering, buzzing and clicking, and then the system rebooted. I scheduled a chkdsk /R (Repair), and the system ran until it froze at stage 4/5 at around 72%. It then rebooted and did the chkdsk all over again and locked up at the same place. Hmm.... bad drive. I replaced the older hard drive with a new one. I initially thought about an SSD, but I want enterprise-class drives for reliability, and they're way too expensive still! I put in a 2TB Western Digital and everything seemed fine. Windows 7 installed without a hitch, and everything was up and running in about three hours. I didn't lose any data because I don't have my data folders on the boot drive. This was a smart move on my part, and saved me quite a bit of rebuilding time because there was no need to copy stuff off the system first. When everything was up and running, I started up Content Manager for managing the Trainz data, and the program froze. I figured that the crashing might have corrupted the assets.tdx file. After the database repair, while in the middle of a good session, the program crashed and the system rebooted! This hard drive started clicking and making other weird noises! I ran chkdsk on this drive, and the drive froze. Another bad drive?

I copied my data off, in between now more frequent reboots, and got my stuff to my internal back up drive. I had tried writing to my USB 3.0 external drive, but that was corrupted from a reboot during a copy to that drive, and it no longer showed up in My Computer and showed up as an unknown drive in the Storage Manager. I figured that it was a safe bet to copy stuff off this drive no matter what, and I did as much as I could between reboots until it completed. By Monday afternoon, I had copied my 1.5 TB of data (500 MB of Trainz stuff plus my other data) to my other internal drive. This was a new drive, by the way, so I wasn't concerned about needing to replace it.

The system then rebooted again randomly while reading Outlook again. At least this time, the drives weren't buzzing and clicking. This sent me on another trip, to my less than favorite electronics store, Best Buy where I picked up a Thermaltake 850W power supply, and an new drive for my data. After replacing the power supply, the system stopped rebooting. The new drives run quietly and very quickly. Some forensic testing on drives showed they had problems. As soon as I powered up the old data drive, it chattered and clicked loudly. When I accessed it through my external drive bay, the system froze. The old boot drive was not much better. This drive was really, really slow as well as very noisy. I suppose the bad power supply may have helped bring them over the edge, but it's hard to tell at this point. The drives had logged close to 10,000 hours on them, according to Crystal Drive Info, and they had been in constant operation for the past 4 years. The power supply was 4-1/2 years old and comes with a 5 warranty. At this point, I'm not even going to bother to warranty the old power supply. The old unit is quite big compared to the new one, and was a noisier both power and fan noise wise.

What did I get out of this? When building a new system, replace everything. It's not worth trying to salvage any older parts, and probably spent a lot more money from Best Buy than I would have if I had gotten the parts at New Egg, or some other online source.

John

 

[Altster]

You can keep your old parts, just use them in a different system after you are done with them.

After reading the first half of your posting I knew it was related to the PSU. I hope you found a good heavy (weighted) duty PSU to replace the one you initially had. Yes, they do lose some of their oomph over time and eventually just give up.

Whenever I have someone stop in our shop looking for a hefty PSU (Power Supply Unit) I recommend them to go to Fry's Electronics (we have one in Indy on the N-E side of the city) and find what they are looking for (wattage, etc..) Then I suggest that they pick up another like-wattage unit and buy the heaviest unit. The heavier units have better heat dissipation (better heat sinks) and will hold up better under load.

...just my 2 cents worth

 

[jcitron]

You can keep your old parts, just use them in a different system after you are done with them.

After reading the first half of your posting I knew it was related to the PSU. I hope you found a good heavy (weighted) duty PSU to replace the one you initially had. Yes, they do lose some of their oomph over time and eventually just give up.

Whenever I have someone stop in our shop looking for a hefty PSU (Power Supply Unit) I recommend them to go to Fry's Electronics (we have one in Indy on the N-E side of the city) and find what they are looking for (wattage, etc..) Then I suggest that they pick up another like-wattage unit and buy the heaviest unit. The heavier units have better heat dissipation (better heat sinks) and will hold up better under load.

...just my 2 cents worth

I sure did replace this with a hefty unit! I always go for a higher wattage than needed. This is something I stress with the people I consult with too. When building systems, even for myself, I usually don't cut corners. This time I was trying to save a bit of cash!

I like your idea of picking up a spare. I may do that when I pay off this bill. It will be worth it to keep one in stock in my basement workshop. The old PS-units do lose their oomph over time. I should have remembered that. The old electronics wear out from the heat and constant use.

I noticed that lately I seem to get multiple problems with a computer or network. Recently someone had a network problem. They had replaced their old router with a new one because they wanted to upgrade it. The usual things happened. It couldn't connect to the internet, couldn't get an a new IP, etc. Okay fine. After walking him through rebooting the router to no avail. I then take a drive across town to see what's up, and what do I find? Some big truck had gone by and ripped his cable off his house! This happened while he was replacing his router.

The same thing happened here with the power supply and the hard drives at the same time. Why make things so difficult? If the system just rebooted, or nicely shutdown, I would have gone for the power supply right away.

We're not so lucky up here in New England, or perhaps the Merrimack Valley where I live. Our closest superstore is Micro Center, and they're located in Cambridge, making the trip awful because it's in the city because there's little parking. We used to have a generic parts supplier up here, but he closed. His kids didn't want to take over the shop after he got terminally ill. We also had good old CompUSA up in New Hampshire (save sales tax too). This was one of the other good places to go, particularly when the other guy was closed on a Sunday. So after CompUSA closed the only place located in a 12 mile radius is Best Buy. Talk about leaving the enthusiasts in a lurch. If I had the energy and money, I'd surely open up another parts store. It would be worth having a place like that around.

John

 

[16k_zx81]

After a rather frustrating weekend, I wonder if it was worth salvaging older parts when rebuilding a computer system. We think we're saving a customer money or ourselves money and time, however, I'm not sure this is the case. I chock this one up as a lesson learned after putting together a new rig for myself a few months ago.

This past weekend was a totally frustrating hell. When I built my new PC a few months ago, I carried over my case, with the power supply, and hard disks which I was using before. Perhaps I should have spent the extra dough up front and got new drives and a power supply, but why would I have to? They all seemed to be working well at the time, and had never given me a problem before. Anyway, the system kept crashing while in Trainz, which is a very graphic and CPU intensive program. I initially thought it was bad video drivers, DirectX versus Open/GL, etc., I updated to the latest ones for NVidia, which didn't help so I reinstalled Trainz, and everything ran fine afterwards. Then last Friday, while in the middle of editing a session, my system rebooted! Huh? What!? I checked the Event Viewer and saw nothing. There was no mention of what happen, which means that the OS didn't have a chance to write anything to the event log. This is not a good thing because it makes finding the problem more difficult. It seems that when problems strike, I get the nasty ones.

After that reboot, I then went back into Trainz and everything was fine for the rest of the day. Saturday was fine until later in the evening when the system rebooted again on me while on the web. At this point, I thought there was a script virus. Those nasty ActiveX script bugs that cause browsers to lock up and systems to reboot. I ran a virus scan and saw nothing. I ran multiple products, and my system was clean. I even ran some rather esoteric root kit scanners, and still found nothing! Figuring there was a RAM problem, I then ran Memtst86 for memory errors. After running for over 10 passes, overnight, nothing was found. From what I've read, and experienced, if the test passes for at least 7 cycles, then it's a pretty good chance that the RAM is good.

Sunday, I was in Outlook, and the system locked. The boot drive started chattering, buzzing and clicking, and then the system rebooted. I scheduled a chkdsk /R (Repair), and the system ran until it froze at stage 4/5 at around 72%. It then rebooted and did the chkdsk all over again and locked up at the same place. Hmm.... bad drive. I replaced the older hard drive with a new one. I initially thought about an SSD, but I want enterprise-class drives for reliability, and they're way too expensive still! I put in a 2TB Western Digital and everything seemed fine. Windows 7 installed without a hitch, and everything was up and running in about three hours. I didn't lose any data because I don't have my data folders on the boot drive. This was a smart move on my part, and saved me quite a bit of rebuilding time because there was no need to copy stuff off the system first. When everything was up and running, I started up Content Manager for managing the Trainz data, and the program froze. I figured that the crashing might have corrupted the assets.tdx file. After the database repair, while in the middle of a good session, the program crashed and the system rebooted! This hard drive started clicking and making other weird noises! I ran chkdsk on this drive, and the drive froze. Another bad drive?

I copied my data off, in between now more frequent reboots, and got my stuff to my internal back up drive. I had tried writing to my USB 3.0 external drive, but that was corrupted from a reboot during a copy to that drive, and it no longer showed up in My Computer and showed up as an unknown drive in the Storage Manager. I figured that it was a safe bet to copy stuff off this drive no matter what, and I did as much as I could between reboots until it completed. By Monday afternoon, I had copied my 1.5 TB of data (500 MB of Trainz stuff plus my other data) to my other internal drive. This was a new drive, by the way, so I wasn't concerned about needing to replace it.

The system then rebooted again randomly while reading Outlook again. At least this time, the drives weren't buzzing and clicking. This sent me on another trip, to my less than favorite electronics store, Best Buy where I picked up a Thermaltake 850W power supply, and an new drive for my data. After replacing the power supply, the system stopped rebooting. The new drives run quietly and very quickly. Some forensic testing on drives showed they had problems. As soon as I powered up the old data drive, it chattered and clicked loudly. When I accessed it through my external drive bay, the system froze. The old boot drive was not much better. This drive was really, really slow as well as very noisy. I suppose the bad power supply may have helped bring them over the edge, but it's hard to tell at this point. The drives had logged close to 10,000 hours on them, according to Crystal Drive Info, and they had been in constant operation for the past 4 years. The power supply was 4-1/2 years old and comes with a 5 warranty. At this point, I'm not even going to bother to warranty the old power supply. The old unit is quite big compared to the new one, and was a noisier both power and fan noise wise.

What did I get out of this? When building a new system, replace everything. It's not worth trying to salvage any older parts, and probably spent a lot more money from Best Buy than I would have if I had gotten the parts at New Egg, or some other online source.

John

I guess it depends on the age of the system, the amount of use it has had, whether the older parts will create bottlenecks, etc.

If you know the parts are relatively 'new' then less risk to recycle and benefit of saving cost. If they have been worked pretty hard, especially hdds and psus, then the risk outweigh the benefits. Especially for a 'production' machine where downtime will be a PITA.

But, y'know, this is computers, man. They're great when they do what they are meant to, but lots of things can go wrong, and do, often at the worst possible moment

Best of luck with the (revised) rebuild. Sounds like it has caused you enough pain for now

 

[jcitron]

I guess it depends on the age of the system, the amount of use it has had, whether the older parts will create bottlenecks, etc.

If you know the parts are relatively 'new' then less risk to recycle and benefit of saving cost. If they have been worked pretty hard, especially hdds and psus, then the risk outweigh the benefits. Especially for a 'production' machine where downtime will be a PITA.

But, y'know, this is computers, man. They're great when they do what they are meant to, but lots of things can go wrong, and do, often at the worst possible moment

Best of luck with the (revised) rebuild. Sounds like it has caused you enough pain for now

Yup. I chocked this one up as experience. I agree... the LGM love to wreak havoc on a computer particularly at the most critical time. Lucky for me this was my system and not a production machine. The hardware was new except for the power supply and the hard disks which were about 4 years old. By most standards this isn't very old, but given that they were used pretty heavily, particularly with 3d modelling, animation, and the Trainz program I use, this tends to put the machines on the edge a bit more. Trainz does push the hardware some and does do a lot of disk reading and writing.

The thing is I keep forgetting about the lower quality of consumer-grade components, and the fact that the quality is getting worse as the price drops. When I was at Polaroid, and managing a bunch of servers and workstations, we had some machines (don't laugh too loudly, please) that were over 15 years old and still running fine. They ran proprietary software for the R&D lab, and the hard drives never died. They were the older SCSI drives which are made so much better than anything we get today.

Thank you for the best wishes. I'm sure I'll be fine now. These are all brand new components now in this system except for the case its self which is about 3 years old. This is one of those army tank aluminum jobs with a gazillion fan holes and lots of cooling space.