Since most of the computers I find deserted on street don't power on even, I read the following to better understand why his could have
possibly happened:


http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/pc...ge-pc-3464434/

http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?p=1748

Lightning strike and surge are troublesome, you replace one part and shortly after another fails. Working at a PC shop we wouldn't touch those, we had a form we would give to their insurance.

If your finding a lot of old ones, take some time to desolder a power supply connector from a dead board and find some led's to build a simple power supply tester.

A simple way to test the power I was told is to connect the Green and a Black wire sockets in a PSU with a wire and then plug it to power, turn it on. This has the effect of booting the PC and starts the PSU. If this doesn't work, I was told that the PSU is dead.

Based on the street PCs I have gotten, since their PSUs don't work, it appears that I need to start collecting PSUs to use with these PCs. Or salvage and use parts. Also, these PCs can be used to practice hardware methods such as Install and remove Mobo and other PC parts. I am not finding many of these, maybe one every 6 months or so if I am lucky, this is not too often. Printers are found almost weekly tho.

Before, I didn't wish to dumpster dive in winter due to severe cold here. But now I feel that I can go on walks and atleast take a look. If I find something interesting and easy to carry, then I can grab it. If not, I can just leave it as such. Will be good to get an idea of what is discarded in winter here locally. I need to get efficient at all these things without being carried away. It is easy to daydream in such a situation.

Yea, what I was meaning is you take an old plug and wire up a switch to the pson and some leds to pins such as the 5vsb. Make a quick simple tester

Some time ago, I mentioned a home built core2duo that will not boot, it had a lot of dust inside it that was removed before.
Well today I removed the PSU of it and some of the screws on it are really tight but it will
not open. I flashed light inside it, it seems ok. So reinstalled it back in.

With some struggle I fixed the CPU fan on this PC well. Then tried again, it powers up and even tries to boot. But the screen shows
very weird images with a lot of small cylinders in lines moving. It also shows the trying to boot screen. So, I assume that the video
card on this one is toast, the fan on it has a hard time spinning. Also, lots of dust behind the video card that is short circuiting it
perhapsm thick layery dust, dried and hard.

I tried to open it again, removed the video card and gently scratched the back surface with a screw driver tip and then wiped away the
dust that came out with a kimwipe dipped in water. It helped a bit but not much. I waited a bit and then tried again, this time there is
no display at all and the video card is not working. Now I feel that instead of trying with the screwdriver I must have tried to remove
the dust with a tooth pick and vinegar later. Then I could have waited more time before trying the video card again. Live and learn.
Certainly dust caused all the issues in this PC.

Now will look out for a new video card. Live and learn.

Edited to add: I was just advised that if the video card had a lot of dust, then the mobo can also be about to toast on this. There is no dust on mobo on top now. However, not sure how it is below it, can't see.

I have a small bag full of AGP video cards. These are from before 2004. The PC that I have from this era doesn't have an agp slot. So guess, will
consider recycling them if I don't get any positive suggestions in response to this post.

One can learn a lot from google images explaining connections such as this one:
http://tinyurl.com/jy3wjhx

Looking up older device manuals and if they can't be found, then closely related manuals is also a good idea, helps to be familiar.

I have a bunch of PCI video cards and even a few ISA video cards. I think I threw away both of my VESA local bus cards, though. A Core 2 Duo build, though, might not have any PCI slots (possibly only PCIe). Anyway, if you don't have any PCIe video card to go with the computer, I'd consider experimenting with using it as a headless machine.

Never heard of this term headless machine before, will look it up. Thanks.

Edited to add, found this:
http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_setup_a_...s_machine.html

Thing is that PC has to be booted and setup somehow to be used as a headless PC. If I don't see the display, not sure if it is booting fully or not.

For windows, yes, it takes extra work to be headless, but Linux is just fine.
Several of my Pi's have never been plugged into a monitor and keyboard or mouse, they were installed headless and run headless.

If you are not comfortable with doing headless install, you can put the hard drive in another computer and do a normal install with a normal install disc. Then put the hard drive back into the headless computer.

Getting older computers to be "headless" is often more difficult. You need good networking to effectively use a headless system.

Only with windows. With linux its pretty simple as most distros will simply boot up with dhcp.

This is a very good point. However, the device etc., will differ not sure if it will boot the same way. Still worth a try certainly.

When you move a hard drive from one computer to another, linux will more or less automatically detect all available hardware and "just work". The main things to be aware of are:

1) Architecture must be compatible with the new CPU. Core 2 Duo is compatible with both x86 and AMD64, so this isn't a problem. It can be a problem when the new CPU is only 32 bit (Atom, as well as very old CPUs).

2) udev rules for network devices will, by default, assign new device names to any detected network devices (e.g. eth1 rather than eth0). This generally isn't a problem for wired networking, but it can be a problem if you only have wireless networking because the new wireless device won't have the connection/password set up.

3) Obviously, you want to install proprietary drivers required for necessary hardware before doing the hard drive swap.