advice re an old PC

Building a PC from components is easy enough. There are only a handful of basic components & they simply slot together. Care needs to be taken to avoid static discharge when handing components such as CPUs & memory. As to whether you could reuse parts of the old PC, it would depend upon who built it. Some brands (e.g. DELL) in the past have used proprietary motherboards, power supplies, connectors & cases making them more difficult to swap major components.

Someone experienced could probably assemble a PC from scratch in 30-40 mins, loading the software would take a lot longer, several hours depending upon what you wanted installing.

Assembling a PC from components may not save you much money vs buying a new one but might lead to greater self-satisfaction. There are plenty of companies that will build PCs for you, or you might be lucky & pick up a bargain 'factory refurbished PC' from a mainstream supplier like DELL, Lenovo etc. I recently purchased a £480 DELL refurb system unit based upon a 3.6ghz Intel i7 with a 500gb HDD, 8gb memory and Win 8.1 for less than it would have cost me to purchase the component parts. At the same time I built a 'headless' mini-ITX based USFF system to act as a data-logger for a weather station for £200 reusing memory & SSD I already had.

My advice would be decide what you want it for & arrive at a specification, make a shopping list of components & then price up a DIY PC vs one off the shelf.
 
Probably the only thing you could recycle is the case.

As Brian says, you need to work out a spec first then figure out the costs.

There are tons of threads about what makes a good computer on here.

If you get stuck, we live in the same town:)
 
I still got my old computer its in an huge Thermaltake case,still like having a mess around inside and upgrading :)
 
You need to look at what components are in the PC you have, you may well be able to use the case, power supply and hard drive (at least as a second drive, or use it for the time being and add a second bigger/faster one later). Check the power rating on the power supply and whether it has compatible connectors for the mother board you intend to buy.

If this were a computer forum rather than a photography forum, someone would, by now, have suggested just putting Linux on the PC, adding a couple of big hard drives and using it as a file server...
 
sirch said:
You need to look at what components are in the PC you have, you may well be able to use the case, power supply and hard drive (at least as a second drive, or use it for the time being and add a second bigger/faster one later). Check the power rating on the power supply and whether it has compatible connectors for the mother board you intend to buy.
Click to expand...

The big question is whether the power supply has sata style power connectors (wider, slim and L shaped) or 4 pin molex connectors for disks (chunkier)

sirch said:
If this were a computer forum rather than a photography forum, someone would, by now, have suggested just putting Linux on the PC, adding a couple of big hard drives and using it as a file server...
Click to expand...
Naah, way to power hungry!
 
afasoas said:
The big question is whether the power supply has sata style power connectors (wider, slim and L shaped) or 4 pin molex connectors for disks (chunkier)

Or buy a Molex-SATA adaptor for £2
Click to expand...
 
Add an RTL SDR stick, DIY antenna, Dump1090 and run it as a ADS-B/mode-s feed to Planeplotter.. ..

(just to be different - otherwise new hard drive and Ubuntu if you'd just prefer a general web browsing/home-office box)
 
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