I've got a 10 year-old Dell T3400 workstation that I bought off-lease;
it's been surprisingly solid all these years. I bought 2 2TB drives to
replace the 160GB 10K drive, and set them up in a mirror.

Over the years I replaced a Nvidia Quadro 4700 video card with an ATI
Radeon 8750 in a swap.

I started with Windows 7, upgraded to a retail copy of Windows 8 I
bought at the Microsoft employee store for $19, then did the online
upgrade to Windows 10.

Windows 10 had been acting up; the RAID card wasn't fully supported
under Windows 10, so the app didn't work (but the driver did),
OneDrive kept complaining about a linked DLL, and finally it stopped
being able to update itself.

I finally bit the bullet, and backed a ton of stuff up to an external
drive. Opened the case, removed all of the dust, reseated everything,
replaced the thermal grease, and put it back together. I have to give
it to Dell, their workstations are well-built.

I found an older version of the RAID drivers that work with Windows
10, did a reformat/reinstall of 1809, and everything is running
perfectly. No more complaints from OneDrive, updates are working, and
it's running cooler.

This system uses DDR2 ECC unbuffered RAM; I could buy a newer DDR3
system for the price of upgrading the RAM from 8GB to 16GB. I was,
however, able to find a cheap CPU upgrade - the original E6550 is a
core 2 duo at 3.0 ghz, I found out that the motherboard can take a
Q9650 core 2 quad chip running at 2.83 ghz. I found one online for
$19.

This should give me a little more horsepower running VMWare.

I've spent about $350 on the system to date for 8 years worth of
constant use, which isn't bad.

Next, I'll see if I can upgrade my 1gb Radeon 8750 video card on the
cheap. I can get 30 fps out of WarThunder as is, we'll see if the CPU
upgrade ups my FPS.





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