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other thoughts

The empty tower

[Today’s run: 3 miles]

I’ve been on the look out for a new desktop PC.

It seems like everything is moving to laptops these days. But, somehow my desk always seems to look like yet another Commodore 64 with wires running all over to little black boxes. I thought for awhile we were going to leave that behind, or at least tucked under the desk. But no such luck.

Anyway, my Dell Optiplex from the decade before last is dying. I know that at least one capacitor on the motherboard is busting open and oozing capacitor guts.

So this advertisement showed up yesterday on Facebook Marketplace for an HP short-tower model. It showed a picture of the sticker: good features and there it said right on the side-sticker “POWERFUL EXPANSION”. The price was about half of what they charge for this model on Amazon. So I went for it.

I got over there at lunch today and picked it up; got it home.

That’s when I discovered what it was. It’s mostly an empty box. There is a little motherboard in there and a fan, a disk drive and a DVD drive. That’s it. The power supply is a laptop-type brick so there isn’t even a power supply in the box. No slots; zero. Can’t add a disk drive. Technically it is expandable: there is one memory slot not populated. Why? Why would anyone want a tower case that is 98% hollow space?

I don’t know. But I’ve got one.

Nothing against the seller. He listed the model number and everything. I should have done more research.

What I was really wanting was to move my 500 GB SSD drive over there as the boot device and use the included 2 TB drive for pictures and other junk. I guess I could probably find a way to do that with duct tape if I yank out the DVD.