Bringing back 10 years old PC to life again

During this recent lockdown I was stuck at home so I decided to revive my old PC which was last turned on around 2011 when I was in college.

Problem 1: The PC won't even turn on

Solution: Got my toolbox , opened up the cabinet, removed the dust and used my lung power !! reseated every component and viola it booted.

Problem 2:  As soon as I turned it on I started getting frequent blue screen of death errors mostly were memory management errors.

Diagnosis: I downloaded debugging tools for windows.I analysed the dump and it pointed to memory corruption. (Debugging tools come with visual studio installation wherein you can load the dump and it will pinpoint your error to a specific module)

Solution: I bought two new DDR3 RAM modules of 2GB each for rupees 1192 (593+599) from amazon LINK and it solved the memory corruption issues. Strangely still DDR3 is in production even after 10 years. Surely somethings don't change

Problem 3: Still sometimes the computer would crash with MEMORY_MANGEMENT errors.

Diagnosis: Analysing the dump and googling the exception code.The culprit was hard disk, it was bought in around 2011 so it had been 10 years!! It would abruptly stop responding and in the meantime , the OS would eventually report BSOD.

Solution: I bought a new 2 TB Hard disk which has better cache (compare 10MB to 256MB). I bought it for rupees 4600 LINK (the price has increased to beyond 5500 when I am writing the blog)

Problem 4: Whenever there was an electricity cut ( which is quite frequent in Indian conditions). The computer would just turn off and next time I started it surely there was some issue with the file system and had to run the disk check.

Solution: I bought a 600VA UPS online from Amazon for 1900 rupees LINK

So I have doubled up my Memory and have increased the hard disk space by 4 times. Still the old hard disk works so I am going to use it as backup.

The performance of the HOME PC is now very good. 

So, Total investment = 1192 (Memory) + 4600 (Hard disk) + 1900 (UPS) = 7692

         

Another addition to the PC a graphics card on 16th August 2023: link I bought it for 2000 rupees but the price has reduced to 1400 as of the time of writing this blog.