Got a free Poweredge 1850 (Caution: Extreme stupidity)

[lhuser]

Alright, so my friend was getting rid of his Poweredge 1850 servers. There was one left so I told him that I would take it.

It comes with a Dual-Xeon 2.8GHz, CD-ROM drive, floppy, one hot-swappable 36G SCSI 10K Seagate HDD (The other tray is missing but I'll be getting it soon).

All I had to do on it is resolder a chip heatsink's hook as those are common to snap, and I've reinforced the other one too.
I also spent $30 on two 1G DDRII-400 ECC RAM and the thing fired right up.

One front USB broke (plastic slid off with mouse's plug) and while using epoxy, it wouldn't work anymore, but I made it work because I broke a majority of the plastic with a pair of pliers and now the contacts are free of obstructions.


Anyways, here comes the stupid aspect of it; I have a very loud 1U rackmount server (I knew it'd be loud to begin with), and it's ready to do some good server oriented stuff and all I find myself doing with it is install a Soundblaster Live sound card, put Kubuntu 11.10 and listen to music and play Kpatience and other games. I also watched a bit of Youtube on it.

Now, all I need is to grab a decent PCI GPU card and try out some 3D games, so I'll be looking more like an idiot than anything else.


It was in my mind for quite a while and I had to share the word.

 

[foothead]

One front USB broke (plastic slid off with mouse's plug) and while using epoxy, it wouldn't work anymore, but I made it work because I broke a majority of the plastic with a pair of pliers and now the contacts are free of obstructions.

Lol. This happens to Dells all the time. Back at my old high school, every once in a while, someone would complain that their flash drive "turned the computer off" because the voltage pins would get bent down and touch the ground sheath on the male usb plug. I actually have one port like that on one of my htpcs right now, but I just put tape over it.

 

[lhuser]

Don't you hate it when USB ports break like that?

I had one on my case break because the chair pulled on the plug and destroyed the hub. I had to redo it with epoxy and this one worked. A friend's laptop kept giving a post error before booting of a USB overvoltage. It's been quite a while, and when I got to it, not only was the USB port broke, but the pins were touching themselves. Still wonder how it booted/survived.