When Mrs.D's sempron pc died, it was leaky caps. Oddly though only one ide channel was killed, otherwise it still worked, but we already got a replacement, which has since been replaced and is now the aforementioned music+file server on my table heaped with junk work area. The sempron got put out with the trash earlier this winter, after languishing under her desk for >5-years. I heroically desisted from cannibalizing its obsolete parts.

Why is that so hard? Why do I have enough brass motherboard stand-offs to interest a scrap metal company, my original PCI video card (128K of memory), two Matrox Mystiques, about 10 million completely redundant circuit boards including things that run scanners that no longer work with any operating system, a couple of CPUs from when people thought sockets were dead and riser boards were the future, and so on and so on? 

I firmly believe it's a man thing in that we're somehow wired (no pun intended) to accumulate potentially useful things that may well come back into some replacement role in the future, and when that eventuality comes about, we can rush to save the day by proudly holding up the decrepit equipment, shouting 'I told you it'd come in useful'.

I have box full of mobo screws, sata cables, molex connections, HDDs, old motherboards, random cable, chargers and more velcro and cable ties than you can shake a shakey thing at. I don't think I'll ever get rid of them. :J

Yep, never want to have the feeling of "I used to own that but threw it out".
But what also happens is "I definitely have one of those but I can't find it, so I'm going to have to order another".

Well, yes, exactly as I felt the other day. As recently as, ooh, only 3 or 4 years ago, I ditched a couple of old 250W power supplies which would have helped with my recent issue. Come to think of it they wouldn't at all since when I did manage to plug a known supply in the results were totally inconclusive. 

But there will definitely be a use for all those case screws, odd shaped devices for mounting odd shaped drives, ISA boards for 14K modems, CD Drives, that Iomega zip drive, those 21 Windows 95 floppies...'Good times, bad times, give me some of that...'

Well, I'm hoarding for the apocalypse, then I will either sell/barter this stuff for boots, beans and bullets, or I will build a mofo attack vehicle. Or maybe not... just in case, you know.

You should see the awesome quantities of shite I've accumulated in my home & in my studio, on the off-chance that it might one day 'come in'.

The apocalypse or Brexit, whichever comes sooner.

A pleonasm shirely? Aren't they one and same?

I hold out the hope that Brexit might be a bit more whimpery than the other thing.

Aye, but will be dependent on who's in charge come the actual day.  :-Y

Anyway, here's a ridiculous thing about my backup PC because I knew you're all hanging on my every word, I got a replacement motherboard (different make) and stuffed it and all the working bits in a new case and plugged it in and - FUCK ME! A few minutes of hesitation, wiggle the video cable and reboot - and it all works perfectly. No OS reinstall, no non-functioning devices, no exclamation marks in device manager*, not even anything odd in event viewer. It's as though the Update Pixie, or Sooty, has sprinkled my new build with oofle-dust and Izzy-Wizzy Lets Get Busy it all just works. Backups are back-upping, Plex is Plexxing. 

*well, one, because of shitty Intel AMT which I hope a BIOS update will lose

 

I think Willy wants to get busy with you.

Have you finished the music thing?
I've lost track.

Well, I wanted to be able to leave it alone again for a few years.

...Oh, and it invalidated the Windows license key and 'deactivated' it. But using an old Windows 7 key worked fine.

Got all the bits now but haven't got round to building it yet.

But the tiny little motherboard and case are very cute.

Here they are next to a medium tower case and my size 9 for scale.

 

Teeny.
What was the reason for STX over a NUC or similar barebones "nettop" type device.
Though I know nettops aren't exactly widespread these days.

There are quite a few mini-PCs around from companies like Beelink and AcePC. They vary in spec from very low-powered Atoms and Celerons up to i7 with 16GB tbh. Most come with Windows 10 or a flavour of Android. That's fine, but I also wanted to have at least 2TB of disk space accessible over ethernet (Gigabit) with a further 2TB to back up the main disk. Almost none of the barebones or built boxes allow for additional drives. I could probably do it using external drives plugged into a mini-PC but there's a huge difference between transferring files over a Gigabit link and over a Gigabit link plus a USB port. Anyway, it was all starting to look a bit cumbersome for something I want to sit in view.

The little Silverstone case has room for a couple of 2.5" drives with proper mounting points. The STX board has 2 SATA headers and comes with matching connectors, plus it has an M.2 slot for a third (PCIe) drive to boot from. So I can put everything into one box and hang a little Cyrus DAC from a USB port at the back. I can control the lot with an eSYNiC mini keyboard and use the telly as a monitor.

Gotcha. Thought it would be storage that was the hold up if you didn't want the storage elsewhere on the network.