Death of an old retainer

This morning saw the end of what might have been my first HP Pavilion desktop, bought back in February 2008, back in the days of Windows Vista.

By the end of its life it was struggling along with Windows 8, a Belkin connection to the Internet and was giving all kinds of trouble. Update to Windows 10 did not look like an option, so it was taken out of the line in the middle of 2015. The fine screen which had come with it was moved downstairs, onto the newer HP Pavilion down there, and, after a bit of trouble with drivers, has worked fine since.

While the rest of it has sat around gathering dust for a year and a half - and so it is now time for it to go.

Two power cables saved and the spare screen moved into the roof to gather dust there, against some emergency or other. But being a touch paranoid about such matters, and also liking to play, the PC itself has been disabled, with the disc unit removed and destroyed - all 150Gb of it on a single 3 inch platter - and what I take to be the processing unit has also been removed, photographed and included above. Perhaps an inch and a half square in real life.

The various little bricks in the middle fit into another little wizmo which lived underneath, but which resisted my attempts to remove it from the metal plate on which the innards of the PC had been assembled. While on the other side there is thin metal box, stuck to the brown board and mostly covered with an even thinner, round pad of what I take to be some kind of heat conducting paste, on which sat in turn a large finned thing, rather like the engine block of a motor cycle and which I took to be a heat sink for the processing unit. How do they manage in a laptop, where you do not have the space for, say, a two inch cube of fins? Plus the half inch or so of fan which sat on top of that.

Next stop the tip down the road with the obsolete cables, the mouse with the obsolete connection, the keyboard with the obsolete connection and what is left of the PC itself.

PS: to destroy the disc unit I took a leaf from the Morse episode 'The Last Enemy', in which the villain takes a hacksaw to his corpses, a tool which he reported to Morse as being well adapted to the business - and I am pleased to be able to report that the hacksaw did a quick and efficient job of cutting this disc unit in half too. But I do wonder how much - if any - of the data would be recoverable now if money was no object?