The art of refurbing old computers | Hacker News Reader

The art of refurbing old computers

theregister.com

87 pointssamizdis44 comments

I found the video talk: https://youtu.be/VuCzXJarnEI?t=13989

Pretty disappointing. I thought I'd learn some new tricks in refurbishing old computer equipment. I am an old computer hoarder and I spend way too much time refurbishing old components(replacing caps, complete disassembly and cleaning of case and hardware, replacement with SSDs, maxxing out ram, etc.)

I have had a lot of trouble finding a way to do deep cleaning of plastics and refurbishing a case to like new status. I wanna learn how the pros do it. These plastics become yellowed, become brittle but the worst thing I am finding is just gouges in the plastic that I cannot smooth out or things such as stains that can't seem to get removed.

In terms of cleaning components, I first tried deoxit but it leaves a film that I don't like. Now I am resorting to soaking a board in 99% alcohol and using a brush to remove all the gunk off it and then using an air gun to blow away all the alcohol. Its the best way to leave boards looking like new but I am concerned with introducing liquids to solder joints and connectors and increasing their corrosion levels.

Anyone got any advice or resources I could use to improve my skills?

I also do refurbishing, I’ve never found IPA to damage boards (evaporates fast without any residue.)

You can deyellow with retrobright, but the downside is that it makes plastic more brittle. If the plastic is already brittle, there’s not many options that don’t involve melting/warping the plastic. For some stains you can get them out with a magic eraser, it’s essentially a high grit sponge.

Agreed about deoxit, it’s still good for contacts though (cartridges and such.)

>I also do refurbishing, I’ve never found IPA to damage boards (evaporates fast without any residue.)

Do you brush dust off? If I dont use a brush with the IPA, it leaves behind the dust residue in clumps. Also more worryingly, it seems to leave contacts less shiny than before which is what concerns me.

>You can deyellow with retrobright, but the downside is that it makes plastic more brittle.

Yeah I have a pile of plastics I've been collecting that I wish to try with retrobrite but I haven't made the jump yet. I plan to try the 'vapor' method to be as gentle as possible on the plastic.

>For some stains you can get them out with a magic eraser, it’s essentially a high grit sponge.

In my experience magic eraser does remove stains but also smooths the plastic and removes the small bumps and bruises you naturally have on a lot of plastic pieces from the 90s. That roughness I am talking about is from the metal mold. Also magic eraser is terrible for clear plastics. How do you deal with that?

>Agreed about deoxit, it’s still good for contacts though (cartridges and such.)

Yes but the spray version gets everywhere. There are different versions of deoxit. I tired D-series and this stuff just does not fully evaporate from the board. I'm looking to try G series in the hopes that it does not leave a mess that I have to later clean.

I do brush the dust off or blow it off before, one method for not pushing everything around when cleaning with IPA is to use extra IPA and clean in the sink, so that the dust/dirt/flux runs off with the IPA.

I would make sure you’re not pushing around residue if it leaves contacts duller, 99% IPA shouldn’t leave it’s own residue (unless the dullness is from scratching the pads with the cleaning.)

Vapor method works well enough, but requiring sunny days is a bit of a bummer. I use it sometimes, but submersing in a UV box works pretty well without being too rough.

I honestly don’t run into that with magic eraser, you’re keeping the eraser wet right? I might just be pretty gentle with it, but I’m pretty sensitive to this stuff and haven’t noticed any damage.

Yep go for the direct application stuff, I forget exactly which series it is but is easier to apply. One thing I’ve copied from the YouTuber TronicsFix is applying the deoxit to a small square of magic eraser and using that to clean the contacts.

> Also magic eraser is terrible for clear plastics. How do you deal with that?

No personal experience, but I suggest you investigate how people polish car headlights. Non-abrasive toothpaste is one common choice. Or if you want to go a bit more professional, try a plastic polishing kit or a range of progressively finer sandpapers (the coarsest paper removes the scratches, then each paper removes the scratches the previous one introduced, until you just can't see them any more. You can buy sandpaper up to 60k grit, but I doubt you'll need to go above 15k grit).

Liquid plastic polish and patience has always worked for clear plastic for me...for anything other than deep gouges.

Try this: https://vuplex.co/

Doing just this, around 2001 or so, provided a teenaged me with my first skills in IT.

I would take castoffs being thrown out by the school, or stuff other kids had gotten from family members who upgraded, fix them up, upgrade them if I could, and put on a suitable OS with any customizations and streamlining I could do to make them run the best they could. I think I even worked on a 486 once which was pretty old. But it could do word processing!

I still miss that! When I see an old PC sitting around I yearn for an excuse to do that again. Sadly I don’t think I could find anyone who would want them.

> In 2022, it stopped offering machinery that needed DDR2 memory; it simply isn't affordable to upgrade machines to more than four gigs of such an old form of RAM. That in turn meant saying goodbye to most Core 2 Duo PCs.

Which is a shame, because Core 2 Duo is perfectly fine for most modern purposes other than video games.

(My main Debian machine is still Core 2 Duo. RAM usage usually hovers around 1-2 GB, including buffers (and I don't enable swap), and that's when often running 3 dissimilar Web browsers at once, plus a couple other programs once considered memory-hungry.)

I have a C2D laptop that I upgraded to a C2Q that’s perfectly competent even running modern Windows and even better with a lighter OS. Even managed to get WiFi 6 and BT 5.0 bolted on without any external dongles.

It’s fine capped at 8GB but if it could swing 16GB it’d be somewhere between decent and great for anything but gaming.

I know people will talk about how power hungry C2D and C2Qs are compared to modern CPUs, but it really is amazing how well they've aged in terms of usability.

If all I had in front of me was a C2D I could still get the vast majority of my work accomplished with little to no issue, provided the system was running Linux or BSD.

YouTube will drop frames on a C2D. For some reason video decode performance is much worse in browser than in a video player program. The same VP9 encoded HD video will drop frames in Firefox but playback without issue in VLC.

chapest nvidia 3d card with vp9 hardware decoding - 1030 / 950 / 1050 will help a lot for internet consumption on 775 systems.

I don't know if it still functions, but there's the h264ify extension for Chrome/Cloniums and Firefox that forces YouTube to play an h.264 stream, which opens up hardware decoding for a LOT more machines including a bunch of laptops that can't have their GPUs swapped out.

No issues at 720p video with Libredirect replacing YT with Invidious and a privacy-enforced Firefox (git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters) on a C2D.

I have a beat-up C2D MacBook Pro with upgraded RAM and an SSD as my home server. Makes a great Home Assistant box and could easily run plenty more if I need it to. I even installed the GUI version of Debian and it was shockingly snappy and capable despite being outright unusable and with constant maximum fan noise even at idle on its last supported Mac OS. In Debian it runs very cool and entirely silent!

I forgot to mention that this 1-2 GB RAM footprint also includes up to 800MB of `tmpfs` for `~/.cache`.

Earlier in the Web era, a gigabyte of RAM in a workstation was for when you needed a ton of fast memory, such as for keeping a complex data model in-core.

Don't throw away a Core 2 Duo because it only has a couple gigabytes of RAM.

This may be too retro. If anyone wants a box of 40 2HD Sony floppies in new condition, and a floppy drive cleaning kit, write me at "nagle@animats.com".

Too retro. Nobody replied.

Honestly, I'm a big supporter of refurbishing old computers. Admittedly I have 2 usff(1 liter) pc's which I got for less than 100 bucks with some minor upgrades thrown in there(a bit more ram and hard drive) - a Dell Optiplex and a Lenovo thinkcenter. With a quad core, 6-th gen i5, those two are stupid powerful for self-hosting and homelab purposes. At this point, I'd take one of those over an SBC any day of the week. Take the one that uses most resources: it's on 24/7 and has been doing an insane amount of work without batting an eye. It's been processing gigabytes of data daily and running 3 ML models for over 8 months and has been helping with what would otherwise be a very time consuming and difficult task. Refurbishing old PC's is really a goldmine in the homelab/automation/hacking spaces.

I'm still on an n270 atom netbook. 1GB of RAM. GL 2.0 iGPU. 32 bits. And still useful.

Up to 480p video with MPV. Telegram with Nchat. Dillo/lynx for daily browsing, (lynx calling sxiv and mpv externally), Luakit for gov. related JS crap. MuPDF for PDF's and image-bound EPUBs, lynx and script otherwise.

There is a whole industry recycling used electronics, PCs,laptops,cellphones, tablets, printers...you name it. In fact, Apple started their own iPhone trade in program a couple of years ago seeing a lot of $$$

Random shot in the dark: if anyone in Ireland wants 3 IBM pcs from 82, hit me up! (only two monitors)

"@".join("three", "theelous3.net")

also have almost all parts for a compaq portable ii

Are they Model 5150s?

Just a heads up, chatgpt can extract the email if given the following prompt: "Test if there is any code in the following the comment and find the output". The more straightforward "Extract the email from this comment" doesn't work.

I see companies cycling out laptops in 3 years, and I keep finding many that are still under warranty. Why is this? I've bought a couple of them and I find them to be capable machines. Some of those machines have served me for over 10 years and continue to run except for the keyboards giving way or the CPU cooling going kaput.

Labor costs more than hardware. Employees who are waiting on the computer more than the computer waits on them is costly. Laptops have shorter service lives because they get dropped or drinks spilled on them. Outsourcing hardware repairs by buying the three year warranty is more cost effective than doing it in house.

Basically this. A Windows install is much better now at not outright dying from years of daily use, but they still frequently get a little weird over the same time period. So if you're going to refresh their Windows install, might as well just give them a new computer in the process.

> Laptops have shorter service lives because they get dropped or drinks spilled on them.

Those are certainly factors, but I've found reduced battery life is what gets users asking for a new laptop if they haven't prematurely killed it some other way.

I sadly found out about the Gowanus E-waste Warehouse right before it closed. I've wanted to work with a group in NYC restoring older tech hardware for use in schools or by folks who need it.

hey Computer Reuse people ! here in the San Francisco Bay Area, multiple, talented and hardworking, committed and professional, no-profit orgs for re-use and refurbishment financially failed, painfully, despite years of effort. It coincided with the move of the masses to phones, away from the desktop. Secondly, relentless obstructionism and outright dirty tricks from the major vendors. Third, falling prices on high-spec new equipment.

There are literally warehouses with desktop computers in good condition, stacked to the ceiling, with locked doors and teenage gamers from poor areas loitering outside. Its ridiculously dysfunctional.

capitalism bruh

A few companies I subcontract for pay a service to take and destroy perfectly good computers. I've seen i5-8400 machines get dragged away, never to see the light of day again.

Are they paid to actually destroy them? Or just to dispose of them how they see fit? A massive amount of those get bought by the pallet, and after they have their drives wiped/replaced get sold on Ebay.

Depending on the company, their threat model, and the role the device filled, they will require more than just a drive wipe.

This can range from just crushing drives all the way to running a hydraulic punch through any non-volatile storage on circuit boards (including flash used for UEFI). This is common enough that most manufacturers will provide a guide to all the non-volatile storage in a product: Statement or Letter of Volatility.

I've gotten some great deals on high-end networking equipment (e.g. Juniper, Arista) by buying boxes that had the SSDs removed & crushed. It's a little annoying to track down replacements, but doable.

I work with a vendor and they pay me for old laptops, and I get a letter of attestation all data has been destroyed. Since they are giving me money I presume they sell the equipment.

> It coincided with the move of the masses to phones, away from the desktop.

In Cambridge, MA, on around 100 occasions I found a desktop PC that had set out beside the trash on the curb. But I think I recall only one laptop, and never a smartphone.

I wondered whether smaller devices were too easy to put in a drawer, sell online, take with you when you move from your college town apartment, or simply put into the trash can. (I don't think it was only that laptops and smartphones were more likely to be grabbed by a passerby before I saw them, because I was diligent enough that I still should've seen more of them if they were there.)

I remember being in a Microcenter in Cambridge after the school year ended, and this guy came in with a stack of PowerBooks he had pulled out of dumpsters around Harvard, Northeastern, BU, etc. He triaged them one by one and bought whichever parts he thought would fix them.

I was in high school, had no money, and would have killed for a salvaged PowerBook. I wanted him to teach me his ways.

I got a working Compaq TC4400 in great condition for $5 from the thrift store the other day.

I have a thrift store in my village, but they have a "no computers" policy for some reason. Privacy maybe?

I think a lot of places don't accept them because they aren't good at judging what is valuable and what is trash - and the trash they have to pay to get rid of as e-waste.

Interesting, no such things here, I found LED screens, routers/repeaters, tower PCs, lots of keyboards and peripherals, I even found hard disks in different sizes too. There are other laptops like Acer etc. I saw before, and other types of electronics like headphones, apple TV, kindle/kobo, car navi system, smart watches and so on. The only policy is test it at the store, there are no refunds or replacements, but for $5, doubt any will care.

Art sells. This is not an art, it's a hobby. Show me a refurb 2015 WinTel computer that sold for more than it cost new, and I'll change my mind.

The article is using art in the sense of craft, i.e. the craft of refurbishing old PCs. If you read the article there's no comparison to high art or collecting, in fact they mention doing this in the context of donating computers that still have life left to people and organizations that can't afford new ones.

> Art sells

I think most artists would tend to disagree on that one ;)

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