Bad Hardware Design

I have had good luck with picking up discarded computers, upgrading them, and making them functional members of the computer or services farm.

A computer consists of persistent storage (disk drives and SSD), dynamic storage (memory), a processor (CPU), and I/O devices.

Data is read from disk into memory, the processor then either executes it or processes it, the results are sent to an output devices. I/O devices allow the input from disks, keyboards, persistent storage devices, networks or other devices. They also send output to video devices, networks, printers, and storage devices.

The thing that defines how a computer can be configured is the motherboard. The motherboard accepts one or more processors, one or more memory devices, one or more I/O devices.

Some motherboards come with built-in I/O devices. For example, A motherboard will come with built-in disk controllers, sound cards, video drivers, USB controllers, P/S-2 keyboard and mouse, serial drivers and many more. These are the connectors that you see on the back of your computer or elsewhere on the case.

Many of these drivers lead to a connector or a socket. If your motherboard has SATA disk controllers, there will be SATA connectors on the motherboard. If your motherboard has built-in video, the back will have an ISA video connector and/or an HDMI connector. It might have a DVI connector as well.

The covers most of what you find on the motherboard. The rest are the important sockets.

There will normally be extension slots. These are where you would plug in extra I/O devices, such as network cards, disk controllers, or video cards. There will normally be memory slots. Depending on the amount of memory supported by the CPU and motherboard, this could be two, four, eight, or even more. Finally, there is normally a socket for the CPU.

For me, I have found that the cheapest way to upgrade a computer is to give it more memory. Most software is memory intensive. If you exceed the amount of memory in your machine, your machine has to make space for the program you want to run. Then it has to read into memory, from disk, the program or its data before it can continue.

The more memory, the less “paging” needs to happen.

Upgrading the CPU is another possibility. This is normally a fairly reasonable thing to do. Consider an AMD Ryzen 7 3700, which is the CPU in one of my machines. It runs $150 on Amazon, today. I purchased it for $310 a few years ago.

Today, I can upgrade to a Ryzen 9 5950x from a Ryzen 7 3700x for $350.

Buying the latest and greatest CPU is expensive. Buying second tier, older CPUs is much more price effective.

The motherboard in this particular server is nearing its end of life. It has an AM4 socket, which has been replaced with the AM5 socket. This means it is unlike that any “new” CPUs will be released for the AM4.

Bad Design

The first place I see bad computer designs is in the actual case. This is not as bad as it used to be. It used to be that opening an HP case was sure to get you sliced up. Every edge was razor sharp.

The next major “bad design” is a case and motherboard combination which is non-standard. The only motherboard that will ever fit in that case is a motherboard from that company. Likely the only place to get such a motherboard is from E-Bay.

The next issue is when there are not enough memory slots, or worse, not enough memory addressing lines. Apple was actually famous for this.

In the old days, Apple used a 68020 class CPU. The CPU that they were using had a 32-bit address register. This is 4 Gigabytes of addressing. More than enough for the time period. Except…

Apple didn’t use all 32 bits, they only used 24 bits, leaving 8 bits unused. This gives 16 Megabytes of addressable memory. More than enough in a time period where people still remembered Billy saying “Nobody will ever need more than 640 Kilobytes of memory”.

Apple made use of the extra 8 bits in the address register for “Handles”. Not important.

Most CPUs today use a 64-bit address registers. I don’t know of a CPU that uses all 64 bits for addressing.

Which takes us to bad designs, again. Some motherboards only bring enough address lines to the memory slots to handle what is the “largest” memory card currently available. This means that you can have slots that support 16 Gigabyte DIMMs, but the motherboard only supports 4 Gigabyte DIMMs.

Often, it is worse. Cheaper motherboards will only have 2 DIMM slots. There is nothing more frustrating than having a machine with 8 GB of memory and finding out that it isn’t one 8 GB DIMM leaving room for another 8 GB, but instead two 4 GB DIMMs. Which means that when you receive that 8 GB DIMM you have 12 GB total instead of the goal of 16 GB, and you have a 4 GB DIMM that isn’t good for anything.

Sub Conclusion

If you want to be able to upgrade your computer, buy a motherboard with the latest socket design. AMD or Intel. Buy one that has enough DIMM slots to handle 4 times the amount of memory you think you are going to need. Buy a CPU that is at 1/4 to 1/3 the price of the top-tier CPU. Depending on the release date, maybe even less than that.

Make sure it has a slot for your video card AND having one PCIe-16 slot still open. You might never use it, but if you need it, you will be very frustrated at saving yourself $10.

Source of the rant

My wife is using an employer supplied laptop for her work. All of her personal work has to be done on her phone. With the kids off to university, their old HP AIO computer is available.

The only problem is that word “OLD”. A quick online search shows that I should be able to upgrade the memory from 4 GB to 16 GB and the CPU from an old Intel to an i7 CPU. This means that I can bring this shell back to life for my wife to use.

At the same time, I intend to replace a noisy fan.

Looking online, the cost of a replacement CPU will be $25. The cost of the memory, another $25. Plus $25 for a new keyboard and mouse combination. $75 for a renewed computer. Happiness exists.

Before I order anything, I boot into my Linux “rescue/install” USB thumb drive. I run lscpu and it spits out the CPU type. Which is AMD. AMD sockets do NOT support i7 CPUs. This means that my online research does not match what my software is saying. I trust the software more than the research.

Turns out that there are two versions of this particular All In One model. One is AMD-based, the other is Intel-based. The Intel-based version has a socketed CPU. The AMD version has the CPU soldered into place. It cannot be upgraded.

These maroons have rendered this machine locked in the past. With no way to upgrade the CPU, it is too slow for today’s needs. Even with maximum memory.

Conclusion

An old computer is sometimes garbage. Put it out of your misery. Use it for target practice or take it to the dump.