Showerthought: Old school tower PCs vs the skinny mini cases everyone wants now

I was cleaning out a client's office last Tuesday and they had this ancient Dell tower from 2004 still running. That thing was a tank. You could swap out a graphics card with your eyes closed. These new compact builds look nice on a desk but man, working inside them is a pain. You basically need tweezers and a prayer to change a stick of RAM. Anyone else feel like we traded function for looks a little too hard?

2 comments

2 Comments

blair_dixon12d ago

Tweezers and a prayer" is way too accurate, I literally laughed out loud. I just built a mini ITX for a friend and my fat fingers were not made for that nonsense.

jesse_fisher12d ago

Fat fingers not made for that nonsense" - man, I feel that in my soul. Did a build last weekend where I dropped a motherboard screw into the PSU shroud and had to tilt the whole case sideways to shake it out. Then I spent ten minutes trying to plug in the front panel headers because the manual might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. I swear the engineers who design mini ITX boards must have fingers the size of toothpicks. By the time I was done, I had more forehead sweat on that motherboard than thermal paste.