Junk Yard Build

I have been an avid computer user for some time now, since kindergarten. I wondered what made a computer work, one day when I was 15 years of age I found out. I happened to be having a bad day when my computer finally died on me, for no good reason at all. So I and my mother went to the local dump and I happened to find about six computers that people had thrown away. Most all of them were missing parts here and there, one case was mangled beyond repair. I ended up picking up everything I could find that was computer related and loaded them into the back of the truck. As we were leaving the dump I found a huge (At the time) monitor, a nice 17 inch CRT one that just needed to be cleaned up, the back of the truck was pretty full at the time so I rode home with it on my lap.

When we returned home I proceeded to clean off all the parts I had picked up from the dump, which I managed to slice my finger open on the mangled case. Once everything was clean and properly bandaged up to keep from making a further mess of the parts I proceeded to remove everything from the cases and off the board. Some things came off so hard they ended up getting broken to the point where I ended up taking them back to the dump. After busting a few more motherboards I went and found my new monitor and cleaned it up some. When I was finished with the cleaning I went back through and verified that everything was nice and clean because my friend is a computer geek and said "Make sure everything is clean" or else it won't work right.

While I was letting everything air out after the cleaning process I proceeded to take apart my old computer that died earlier in the day. Upon opening it, it was a horror of dust and debris collected throughout the years of being on constantly. I didn't like that at all, so I took the computer into the garage and took my father's air compressor to the inside of the case and found out if you take the compressed air to the processors cooling fan it will make some cool sounds. Once I had finished playing around and actually cleaning out the case I actually took my time and properly removed the motherboard and all the hard drive, CD ROM, and such.

Now that I had accomplished all of this, I was now ready to begin putting it all back together and testing to see if everything was going to work. After a few hours of switching things around I finally made a combination that worked out. This computer that I just built from scratch from dump parts actually worked! It's amazing that people throw working electronics away when they upgrade. Since that first day of going to the dump I still go almost on a daily basis. I'm now 21 years old, and still find new awesome things all the time and have built many great computers thanks to people who don't value old technology.