A friend gave it to me. The PC wasn’t really broken; the hard drive had died and the cost of a new drive was more than an older PC was worth. It just so happened that my old, tired, loud, big sever really needed to be replaced. The PC is an HP tower and about half the size of that old box. The internals are an AMD 64-bit chip with 4GB RAM, and a CD/DVD Drive. It has ports for USB, SDcard, and ethernet. It even has wifi.
The project took a bit of ingenuity and work but the result is quite satisfying. It sits on white wire dish shelf from Amazon, and under that is the UPS. The silence in our office is quite golden now.
I replaced the broken hard drive with a laptop drive because of size and durability, and I replaced my old mirrored drives that we use for our file server with two more laptop drives. In order to fit these into the old PC, I used a Mounting Bracket and sata splitter cable to connect them. This required that I remove the CD/DVD drive. I purchased a Sata-to-USB adapter and use the CD Drive with my laptop since it’s much better than the built-in one.
