For my first HomeLab project I bought 2 cheap used towers to tear apart, study and rebuild. I’ve been working with Laptops for over 10 years and it’s been a long time since I saw the inside of a normal sized PC. I was studying for the Comptia A+ exam at the time and being able to get an up close and personal look at the parts I was studying was incredibly helpful.
I started with the Dell Optiplex. It’s a small machine, the SSD was obviously added later. It had minimal RAM so I ended up taking some from the HP to max it out. I took everything out so I could get a really good look at the insides, connectors on the motherboard and get to the RAM.
After I combined the DDR3 RAM and put everything back together I installed VirtualBox and the Optiplex has been my virtual machine home. I’ve been able to learn not only Virtual Machines for the A+, but also worked with Windows Server 19 Core, Windows Server 19 Desktop and a bit with Linux Mint. It won’t handle my daily driving, but as a Virtual Machine it is carrying it’s weight.