Unfortunately, because I do not remotely have the money to make any serious pursuit of it.
I decided to buy some bottom of the barrel and used components and build a desktop to use as a media server--this seemed like a more practical plan than buying a prebuilt machine of any kind because I can just load it up with drives we already own and save a *ton* on storage. And I could focus resources on where I felt would be most useful. So it has the approximate processing power of a potato (used ancient CPU that cost like $9, so if it's not enough for my purposes it'll be no great loss to get a better one, and if it is enough I've saved money!), and a very cheap old graphics card several generations behind, a single 4gb stick of RAM, and a used motherboard, and a case that's new but from a company so hilariously cheap that the only documentation is a single sheet of paper with a heavy pixelated photo of the case with a few labeled arrows.
I only got to finally build it yesterday, because it took that long for the motherboard to arrive, and I still can't actually turn it on and see if it boots because the SATA cables haven't come yet, and the used motherboard came with nothing but itself (including no IO shield, which I remember making a mental note about when I bought it but then I absolutely forgot to order one and only realized while building, so I'm going to have to install that later. I'm bidding on a broken used for-parts-only copy of the same motherboard, because it's 95 cents and $9 shipping and ships from the US, and the alternative is like $8 for just the IO shield, with free shipping, from china that will take like two months to get here). The motherboard is ASUS, though, and there's extensive documentation online, so I don't mind at all not having a manual or anything. And I managed to work out where everything went in the case just fine.
Other parts include:
Full parts list with prices, and some pictures of the in-progress build, on my neocities, which is having some hilarious interaction between the imgur embed code and my transparent boxes over the background to make the text more readable (I know it's a nightmare I was being retro to amuse myself and I haven't gotten around to making it less busy) has rendered the embedded photos semitransparent. But you can see them well enough to be getting on with!
I keep browsing components on newegg and ebay. I deeply enjoyed putting it together. I want to do more. I've taken everything useful out of three old laptops because I wanted to keep tinkering with something and I might need to buy more antistatic bags to keep the scavenged components safe. This is terrible.
I decided to buy some bottom of the barrel and used components and build a desktop to use as a media server--this seemed like a more practical plan than buying a prebuilt machine of any kind because I can just load it up with drives we already own and save a *ton* on storage. And I could focus resources on where I felt would be most useful. So it has the approximate processing power of a potato (used ancient CPU that cost like $9, so if it's not enough for my purposes it'll be no great loss to get a better one, and if it is enough I've saved money!), and a very cheap old graphics card several generations behind, a single 4gb stick of RAM, and a used motherboard, and a case that's new but from a company so hilariously cheap that the only documentation is a single sheet of paper with a heavy pixelated photo of the case with a few labeled arrows.
I only got to finally build it yesterday, because it took that long for the motherboard to arrive, and I still can't actually turn it on and see if it boots because the SATA cables haven't come yet, and the used motherboard came with nothing but itself (including no IO shield, which I remember making a mental note about when I bought it but then I absolutely forgot to order one and only realized while building, so I'm going to have to install that later. I'm bidding on a broken used for-parts-only copy of the same motherboard, because it's 95 cents and $9 shipping and ships from the US, and the alternative is like $8 for just the IO shield, with free shipping, from china that will take like two months to get here). The motherboard is ASUS, though, and there's extensive documentation online, so I don't mind at all not having a manual or anything. And I managed to work out where everything went in the case just fine.
Other parts include:
- an optical drive with bluray capability, because we don't have a single thing in the house that can play blurays but we own a bunch of blurays (ones that come with digital copies of the movies, which are how we've watched them, but it'll be nice to be able to actually use our physical copies, and also most importantly the making-of documentary in our dvd-bluray limited edition boxset of 3 From Hell is not available in the digital copy and only the first quarter of it fit on the DVD so we haven't been able to watch it THIS ENTIRE TIME IT'S BEEN MONTHS) [arrived, installed]
- a $12 used 500gb 3.5" hdd, because it seemed sensible to have *something* that wasn't scavenged out of a laptop [arrived, installed]
- an actually new but quite cheap power supply [arrived, installed]
- a PCIE card that goes in the smallest PCIE port that I'm sure not using for anything else and that I can mount two card-style M.2 SSDs on [ordered, not here]
- a CPU cooler so cheap it doesn't even have a brand name [arrived, installed]
- actually very good thermal paste because I bought it to replace the thermal paste on my laptop because the internet indicates that this brand's stock thermal paste is bad and that may be why my laptop is so bad at cooling and of course I'm also using it on the desktop, it's not like I'm in any danger of running out [arrived, installed]
- a bracket to install 2.5" drives in a 3.5" bay [ordered, not here]
- ordered a roll of cable tie velcro after building it and realizing that cable management might actually be important [ordered, not here]
Full parts list with prices, and some pictures of the in-progress build, on my neocities, which is having some hilarious interaction between the imgur embed code and my transparent boxes over the background to make the text more readable (I know it's a nightmare I was being retro to amuse myself and I haven't gotten around to making it less busy) has rendered the embedded photos semitransparent. But you can see them well enough to be getting on with!
I keep browsing components on newegg and ebay. I deeply enjoyed putting it together. I want to do more. I've taken everything useful out of three old laptops because I wanted to keep tinkering with something and I might need to buy more antistatic bags to keep the scavenged components safe. This is terrible.