Vault Disassembled

I have spent a very large amount of time building computers. Some of them for reasons, many of them for no particular reason at all, other than the fact that it’s just something I like to do. 

It’s a terrible, expensive hobby. Resell is not great either.

I have ended up with lots of computers which I’ve built, changed, swapped parts between, optimized, re-optimized, and then… shelved.

There is no need for them. 

I can’t even think of things that I actually want to do to utilize them.

Before you ask, I can’t just give them away. I like to be generous in my life, but most of the time I can’t afford to give away that much.

I mean, it’s happened. But it’s infrequent.

Anyway.

My life has resulted in a lot of, at best, uncertain moods. And an increasing amount of time where I literally sit in the computer room and just ponder.

Sort of brainstorm but not really. Almost meditate, really.

I’ve joked more and more than my computers are pointless, yet I gradually accumulate more components. Sometimes I think I have grand intentions, and sometimes I do actually think I’m trying to fill some emotional void with PCs and parts. 

I do also suffer a sort of a FOMO when there’s a deal on…

But the thing I think I’ve realized as of late is that most of the computers really Are pointless. I do enjoy building them but less so as time goes on. Not to mention the fact that beyond my own experience, building them really does get easier and easier as parts change, manufacturing changes, software changes, and the interest in building for one’s self becomes more and more mainstream. Seems like just the other day I threw something together for the heck of it and between the modular power supply, the easily accessible case, the use of a CPU with integrated graphics, and the implementation of a single m.2 nvme solid state drive, assembly took little more than 25 minutes, and that’s cable managed for cleanliness too.

So, as of this writing, I’ve taken the past day to do something I really haven’t done at the scale I just did:

I took almost everything apart. In fact, since I keep these things, I took nearly everything apart and reset most of it to its original retail packaging.

It’s an interesting exercise, and surprising I’ve found something (even this modestly) new to do. Or maybe it’s just what I needed to do having no particular direction as of late.

But I went ahead and did basically the opposite of usual.

And I’m thinking about selling off a lot of it now. Whatever would sell for any appreciable amount of money. But that’s a separate hurdle to surpass, and I’ve only just figured out this new method of… killing a few hours.

It’s strange though. And I wonder what it means.

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Nagi tertiary file server: disassembled.
SFF Gamer: disassembled.
H370 system: disassembled.
“Durable” fast storage experiment: disassembled.
Mini-itx experiment: disassembled.

Hodoka secondary file server: to be disassembled.

Bean remote access PC: up.
Bench resource PC: up.
Gamer: optimized, still up.
Hina Primary server: up and active.