Steve goes dumpster diving, part 73
This tale is brought to you by my left kneecap, which was the point of contact with a forlorn-looking PC in my recycling room. Everyone has one of those, right? Well mine is beside a hidden London Underground power station and has the unfortunate habit of becoming wet. I was doing my lockdown chores and taking out the rubbish when I noticed, sitting there unloved, the tobacco-yellow Dell Studio XPS you can see in the picture to the right.
With a ton of writing to do, and a series of administrative deadlines insisted upon by creepily unmanned AIs to ignore, I grabbed the soggy PC and marched it into my watertight basement. Regular readers will know this is not my first rescue. Whilst many of my colleagues are driven by the innovation created by new tech, my interest is in what people do with old pieces of technology when they think people like me aren’t looking. A trail of dead PCs, discarded tablets and unfashionably old but functional printers is my evidence – and more often than not, that evidence is easy to come by because these machines are nowhere near as dead as their situation suggests. The revival process for this ten-year-old Dell probably took me a couple of hours, spread over a few days.
So let’s examine the fix process on this Dell in more detail.
At first pass, it did indeed seem like a job for the dumpster. Whilst it doesn’t take long to type “five beeps Dell Studio 8100” into Google, especially with its new top five answers format for tech instructions, things slow down when none of those answers tell you how to fix the apparent fault. They all said “dead battery” right enough, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out, but the egos of any fixers will have been severely impacted by the fact that those beeps don’t stop after you apply Google’s recommended fixes. Why? Because you need to find and swap over the CMOS clear jumper, on the motherboard, for a few seconds… with the power lead out of the IEC socket for good measure.
Of course, I’d like to talk about this as a smooth and logical progression of deduction, but in truth luck had a hand. To remove the CMOS battery you have to remove the graphics card, especially if it’s one of those early 21st century double-wide jobs. And this was one such card: a Radeon 5 series with the big plastic cooling shed and connections for auxiliary power. All of this in a mid-sized case made re-insertion a trifle awkward, so I grabbed a much smaller, fan-less, powerless card and threw that inside.
I was greeted by Dell’s familiar middling-loud “whoosh” on the next power up, and an equally familiar onscreen message that told me default CMOS values would be used due to the non-volatile memory being corrupt and/or unreadable. The big old graphics card had died – so badly that it could stop the system from even showing a status LED or turning a fan while starting. Good news and bad tumbled past. 8GB of RAM! That’s good. Just under 3GHz from the early Core i7 CPU. But no hard disk.
Armed with a bootable USB stick containing my Windows 10 build and a cheap 256GB 2.5in SSD, it took me a shade under an hour to get the machine running, with updates and machine-specific drivers included. The only slight warning signs were that there were no BIOS or driver releases past the initial versions on the Dell support site; a memory of that ignoble period when machines could appear with restrictive support that (as Jon Honeyball said at the time) limited their life in business use to under a year in some cases.
Or: maybe the in-built support has stayed so good that there’s no need for updates. Why think of it this way? Because once this PC was configured, it was astonishingly fast. High clock rates always beat multiple cores when it comes to aficionados benchmarking and comparing, but there’s also a separate population of “well-matched designs” – machines that don’t stint the minor chips in favour of a CPU that spends most of its time waiting.
This feels like one of those in everyday use. Fast, stable, quiet now, and well-equipped with support for digital film and even a Blu-ray player. At least, I think it’s a player and not a recorder. That would have been fun.
My final note on this machine: pay attention to your fans. I estimate the CPU and heatsink were blocked to two-thirds of normal cooling, making the fan run harder and louder (and thereby collect more dust, hairs and threads). The i7 fan assembly even has neat clips to make it easy to pull the fan off and remove all that grot.
It was harder to deal with the rear case fan, which was firmly mounted by weird grub screw-like selftappers, but that produced a much more perceptible effect once I got to the surfaces of the blades. An even covering of bobbly, faintly tobaccosmelling goop was enough to make the fan noisy and over-eager, both from turbulence and from the little thermosensor being covered in grot. It used to be the case that fans were busting themselves just to keep your machine operational, and therefore moved enough air that the pollutants couldn’t settle, but as power levels have dropped, we have lower-speed, larger, more energy efficient air cooling – which, to keep the balance of power intact, are readier hosts for the dirt that puts components at risk.
“My interest is in what people do with old tech when they think people like me aren’t looking”