One of my Big Al Computers (Chopper) was awarded to my friend Greg a few years ago as a LAN party prize (2017 Memorial Day LAN party to be exact), but some problems surfaced over the past 6 months with the spinning hard drives from repeated power cuts to the system (in place of normal shutdowns), resulting in a corrupted Windows 7 OS and erratic performance. The solution to this problem was to pull the guts out of my famous Game-a-Tron-2 machine (which was a Windows 10 gaming computer running an AMD 2600X Ryzen CPU and an AMD 580 video card), and then buy some new parts to make Game-a-Tron-3 a more up-to-date gaming machine running Windows 11, an AMD Ryzen 5600X CPU and an AMD 6700XT video card. This was done after 15 hours of my precious time were wasted trying to fix the original Chopper, with repeated failed installs of Windows 7 and even Windows 10 OS software. I even tried installing Windows 10 on an SSD through the Chopper motherboard's SSD connections and that failed. You can only do so much before you just replace a motherboard and the related components.
The rebuild process was pretty straight forward, given that I was pulling a micro-ATX motherboard from Game-a-Tron-2 and replacing it with a more modern micro-ATX motherboard (The Gigabyte B550M Aorus Pro-P) and a Windows-11 compatible CPU, the AMD 5600X (using the stock CPU cooler). I now have 32GB of DDR4 RAM in Game-a-Tron-3 though, so it's ready for the bigger games even though I'm still running it on the same 1080p monitor. We'll see how this rebuild works at our upcoming Labor Day 2022 LAN party.
Does anyone have a similar situation, where they pulled parts from a newer system to get an older one working again?
Lessons Learned during this rebuilding process:
(1) Determine how much time and money you are willing to put into replacing parts for an older non-functioning computer. I had fixed Chopper last year by installing Windows 7 on top of itself to fix a corrupted boot loader. That same fix didn't work this time. I never did figure out why I couldn't get Windows to install on either the old HDD or a new SSD with the old Chopper. I think it has to do with either the motherboard or the memory (DDR2).
(2) My decision as to which of my existing gaming computers to steal parts from was based on the machines that I could not upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. My friend was previously running Windows 7, so he's getting the ability to now run Windows 10 and that will be supported for a few more years. Besides, I didn't charge him anything for my time or for the parts, so he's not going to complain. Chopper-2022 is once again a decent gaming computer for my friends role-based games.
