Refurbishing an Old Office PC

Bringing It Back to Life

Older business desktops are absolute tanks. Swapping in a cheap SSD and a bit more RAM gives these machines a massive second life for basic web browsing and daily tasks. And with the current polycrisis in tech, (ram, gpu, storage, Windows powerslop forced upgrade) there are tons of awesome options that can be flashed with a Linux OS and be perfectly cromulent gaming rigs. I recently found one in the garbage of my office building and it is now my favourite gaming PC. Crazy.

Now, why do I say my interest in grabbing junk and using it is a symptom of greater collapse? Well for this we turn to Charles Bukowski, and my grandmother. In Ham on Rye, Bukowski repeatedly speaks to the meanness required to survive in this time and place in America post WW2 in a society informed by the scarcity of the Great Depression and required for survival through the parenting of PTSD afflicted dads. Essentially, to survive that period, you had to create virtue through thrift and repair, and occasionally through the kind of inverted morals that finds kinship in a thieves guild. Essentially, selfishness and creative application, occasional theft via availability (no one will miss this, they weren't even using it) determines the ethical correctness of an action.

Now, my grandma was a saint. She grew all the flowers for her local Catholic Church, raised and killed her own rabbits for food, and physically crushed my dad's hand in her hand shake. She also made her own moonshine and generally fucked shit up with her kindness and steel. She was rebar wrapped in homemade caramel. Now, at the same time, she never threw away or wasted a single thing. Her fence, her garden, her home, everything was made of the recycled bits of other things. She had a knife with old shaved fence boards for a handle, sharpened to a needle like point through decades of sharpening. This knife was probably what was used to skin the aforementioned rabbits as well. This depression era living, combined with the knowledge and skills from a lifetime lived using what others missed to improve your own life. This, taking the waste of others, and turning it into gold is the straw into gold pride of a now lost generation. This ethos will be the renaissance of our own productive capacity in the expanding rentier economy.