The PC I put together a few years ago (well, Scott Sullivan told me which bits to get, I bought them and assembled it) is still working really well. It was quite spiffy in its day — i7-4790K, 32 GB DDR3, Asus H97M-E — and is quite fast enough for me.
One thing, though, has never worked. The hardware serial port (the old kind, not the USB kind) refused to do anything. Only in the last day or so did I work out why and managed to fix it.
PC serial ports for roughly the last 25 years connected to the motherboard like this:
This rather strange mapping makes sense as soon as you see an IDC ribbon-cable DB-9 connector:
Going along the cable from left to right (reversed in the photo above), we have:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9
This was good enough for everyone except ASUS, who decided that they needed their own way of arranging cables. Because of course they would:
With a bit of resoldering, I’ve got a working serial port. You can never have too many.