Having a hard time deciding on whether or not to part with my desktop

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Hey everyone,

So I just bought a laptop. It’s an Asus G752VT, and I love it minus the broken F5 button (any tips on how to ‘fix’ a broken laptop key would be great) and I got it for a steal of a price (480 after shipping) on r/hardwareswap via Reddit.

But anyway, I have this dilemma. I really don’t know what to do about my desktop. I love having access to a larger monitor, and I love the power BUT I can’t make use of it and won’t be able to for another year until I’m off to college. Why? Slow WiFi. I didn’t think this would be such a kicker, but it truly is. I sync roughly 500gb of Android source code at my high school on my laptop, but can’t at home. Thus, except for the occasional game like Just Cause 3 or ESO it just sits there collecting dust. I feel so bad about it too. Like, the computer of my dreams as a 14 year old is sitting there… Doing nothing. But anyway, here’s the deranged specs that I thought was good 4 years ago when my mom and I scrounged together every penny we could to build it:

i7 5820k (man, was this thing a beast at launch)
8gb DDR4 (I was willing to make a sacrifice in certain areas to have X99 for future expansion)
500gb HGST drive and a 1tb WD black
Fractal Design R5 (remember the Tek Syndicate review. Really sold me on it)
Reference (blower) GTX 970 (got one a few months back for only a 100. Sold my 280x for more than that the same month. Win/win).
Some optical drive that was literally only used to install GTA V.
Cooler Master Nepton 140XL AIO (gets the job done, handled a modest overclock).
AsRock X99 Taichi motherboard (again, I believe I saw a review of it here and after having had a few Asus X99-A boards fail on me I figured it was worth a shot)
EVGA 850w G2. Got it for a nice price in July.

So yeah, nothing crazy, but I have a lot of damn memories using that computer. I don’t think I can get rid of it. I mean, at most I’d get $700 off of it (if that). Each time I look at it, it reminds me of all the shit my mom and I went through to get it built. It’s like a masterpiece…

So, why these thoughts? Well, today I had noticed that my laptop didn’t have an SSD in it… but my desktop did. Given that I don’t use my desktop much, I figured I’d take the M.2 WD Black I have and transfer it over… But while I was doing that I felt terrible. Like, I got this really bad feeling of regret the second I finished the job too.

For comparison, here’s the specs of my laptop:

i7 6700hq
GTX 970m
256gb WD Black M.2 (2D NAND, pcie)
1tb HGST drive
17.3 inch GSYNC display
16gb DDR4 (expandable all the way up to 64gb)

So there you have it. I really don’t want to get rid of the desktop, but I feel as though I’ll have to wait to truly take advantage of it. At the same time, it’s sentimental. It truly is. It’s the first computer I ever built. If I don’t end up selling it, I’m probably going to end up upgrading it again next month. Getting a new SSD (again), and getting another stick of RAM…

Weird… I know. Thoughts?

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Congrats on the new acquisition.
There are folks on the Internet who sell individual matching key caps. I had to get one for my moms’ ThinkPad. They aren’t cheap, at like +/- $5 a piece, but it’s better than buying a replacement keyboard.

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I only read the top part. Just get a better wifi card

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  1. Build decent UPS
  2. Screw carrying strap to PC case
  3. Carry that shit to class.

In seriousness though - if it isnt getting used, and the laptop does what you need, I would sell the PC. Its only going to decline further in value. Save what you get for selling it, put it in a high interest account and after you finish college OR get decent WiFi at home, build a new system.

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Agree with @Yoinkerman, the way you describe it you are not using your desktop only due to a slow wifi NIC? I’d assume both your laptop and desktop have an ethernet port? A few bucks will buy you a crossover cable, assign a static IP on each to the port and job done.

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Yeah, that’s hard. If you really, really don’t have a use for it (and not going to have a use for it in the forseeable future) I have to agree with @Kocytean. Selling it sooner rather than later would make more sense.
On the other hand, if the only problem is the slow wifi, go with @Yoinkerman s advice and get a wifi card, those are really affordable these days and ssd prices are also coming down.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

  • The main question is, would you use the PC if it works properly to your expectations (wifi) or do you really not have any performance needs beyond a Laptop? I don’t really believe the latter is the case otherwise you would not have bought a high end platform.
  • Do you expect to buy a PC tower again after a year or not? If yes, I think keeping it would be better from a value standpoint. This platform will last you a long time to come and you won’t get it’s true value in money.
  • What do you use your computer for? Gaming? Video editing? Computer sciency stuff? Data crunching? If any of the above is true it would not make a lot of sense to sell it.
  • In case it is only for sentimentality that you want to keep it and you don’t want to part with it, I would recommend the following: Fix the wifi problem and make up a reason for using it. In short get a hobby that makes use of your PC. Maybe 3D graphics with Blender, download some timeseries data from NASA and do your own numbercrunching, compile your own software, … whatever. You are going to learn a lot and you don’t have to feel bad about your PC.

Personally, I will always have use for a tower PC. I even have set up my PC so I can wake it up from my laptop, conect to it and run compute intensive tasks there. It just depends on what you use computers for.

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I have a use for it. I compile Android from source. It can take hours without proper hardware. Good points though.

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It’s not that the WiFi built into the board is bad. It’s that I live in the mountains and the connection itself is terrible. We are talking max download speeds of 100kbs on a good day lol.

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In that case, try to cache the hell out of everything that makes sense!

Edit0: Also, sorry about your internet speed, that is horrible.
Edit1: How do you get internet currently? (mobile data?, phoneline?) How far are you from civilisation? Maybe you can set up a point to point wireless system to somewhere with better speeds? That is in essence what I have done here, set up my own connection and hooked up the neighbors too to make it cost efficient.

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Yep, as I said it would, sell it.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/tech-planning-for-college/129458/16

the laptop is what matters 95% of the time in college so your desktop will probably mostly collect dust.

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I can’t remember our ISP off the top of my head but we are on the best plan you can get here. I live up in the mountains in Colorado. Pretty far from Denver and larger areas like that.

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Amen to that

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I’d run Ethernet but I was told it “looks bad.” So that’s a no lol. Even offered to buy sheaths for it. Doubt it would perform much better though.

We actually have a Nighthawk bridged to our modem right now to help with signal loss.

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… if only modular laptops didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Then it would make this easy. I know there’s a few Eluktronics barebones kits but they are made out of plastic and feel like crap.

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The clip fits fine into the key, but not into the actual slot that’s over the membrane. I’ll get pictures later. I think a clip on the board itself might have broke. IDK. If it did, replacing the keyboard is a PITA on these things but it’ll have to be done…

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Yeah, with laptops the best you can hope for nowadays is to still be able to upgrade ram and an ssd and maybe change the battery :frowning:

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Can you get a dock for the laptop? I use a dock with two monitors attached and a full KB/mouse.

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Idk man we’re sentimental about things. If its not in the way, keep it. Hell ask your mom what you should do since it was both of yours project.

You could always remote into the desktop. Also, in HS when I was working on BIOS cracks, my pentium 4 desktop was ages fasher than my pentium M laptop. But since I was stealing the neighbors wifi I didn’t have a way to connect over ethernet to dump over ftp or something. So, what I did was got some cheap shit eth switch, had my desktop host local-only dhcp with a max of 3 allocated IP’s, plugged it to the switch, and made a little dock for my laptop. So I’d dump my code to the desktop that was faster every day I got more progcess at school on the project.

I think I used mongoose webserver, but I could have used clover as well. Not sure.

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I’ll take a look. Sounds like a great idea. Doesn’t have any native mounting mechanism like my old Latitude did so I’ll probably have to go through something like thunderbolt.

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That’s a great idea too. I was considering that for when I go to college so that I can host a Jenkins for the rest of the team and myself.