It was a dusty box, and shaking it produced a horrible rattle that told me it was full of junk, but, maybe it would be okay. I got to work, and before going in, dusted it off and looked inside. There was a memory module bent in half and cracked. The CPU fan was pulled off, and the heatsink for the chipset had come off too. It looked like someone opened it up and pulled things off.

What a waste of what was probably perfectly good equipment. It's like "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". It's like smashing your windows and pouring sand into your engine because your starter broke and your brakes are soft.

Remember, some parent in China, Malaysia, Mexico, or the Philippines was exposed to toxic chemicals and gave birth to a baby with flippers instead of arms, so that you can have your computer.

After work, I got it home and messed with it. Here are the pictures and explanations.

The computer was pretty dusty.

The inside was a mess, too. Someone pulled the heatsink and fan off the CPU.

The heatsink was full of dust. You can clean it under warm running water with some glass cleaner. Dry it out well.

Usually, the part that's broken is the power supply. The problem is often exploded capacitors ("blown caps"). Capacitors are like batteries that hold charge in a plastic or oily substance. As they age, the chemicals can turn to gas, and the pressure causes them to leak. Circa 1999 to 2007, there was a "capacitor plague" of capacitors from Taiwan that were formulated incorrectly, leading to premature failure. Repairing is usually as simple as replacing the caps.... but that can be expensive because there are so many.

PS - these were cheap caps. At one time, a company stole a recipe for capacitors from a factory in Japan, but didn't get the whole recipe. Millions of parts were made with the incomplete recipe. These capacitors got used in all kinds of equipment, and the computers started to fail. After then, demand for capacitors "Made in Japan" increased, and motherboard vendors started advertising it. It's kind of foolish. The issue is the recipe, not the nation of origin.

Here's the power supply, opened up. Be careful when opening power supplies, because if the capacitors are still charged (and they can be for days after the computer is unplugged) and you touch them, you can get a shock, or cause an explosion.

Here's a close-up of some capacitors with bulges:

Here's another close-up. I thought the white stuff was dielectric, but it apparently is glue, which is okay.

I thought I saw a leaking dielectric, but it turns out what I saw was glue. My error.

Well, the power supply looks pretty much gone.

Next, I checked out the old hard disk. Maybe the drive wasn't harmed.

First, remove the cables and unscrew the drive cage. Then remove the drive from the cage:

Then test it with a USB/IDE adapter:

The drive shows up in the hardware manager:

But it doesn't show up as a disk. The drive just makes "seeking" noises (the faint grinding noise).

The disk is probably dead. This is not encouraging. (It turned out the disk worked, but only when connected to a Linux system. That was really odd, because the system on the disk was Windows. It was a FAT partition.)

The motherboard (aka mainboard) is not looking too good. One of the capacitors near the CPU is bent over a bit. That's not good, because the metal can is probably open to the air now.

The inside is still dusty. It looks like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag, or the bottom of my socks at the end of a day.

Here's the board identification. It was a GQ7000, one of those computers they sold cheap at Fry's that had Linux on it. The board is an ECS 661FX-M, which was a pretty good board.

The CPU appeared to be intact, though. Here, I've washed off the greasy heatsink compound. It was rubbed with water and dish detergent, and then wiped clean with a damp paper towel. You can read the markings. It's a Pentium 4, 3.0 Ghz, with 1MB cache. The formal name is SL7PM, as you can read. I believe this was the fastest one, more or less. It's a "Prescott".

So this excursion into trash collecting didn't pan out too well. I did some comparison shopping to find out what it would cost to build a PC with the salvaged CPU plus new parts, and what it would cost to make a system that didn't use the CPU. Re-using the P4, I could build a computer with 4 gigs of RAM for around $180. A dual core Pentium Duo with 4 gigs of RAM, mainboard, power supply costs around $250 in parts (not including a case). (Prices do not include a new disk.) So, $70 gets me a whole second CPU and a significant performance boost.

All I got of value from this, aside from a potentially broken CPU (worth $25 on the market), was this blog post.