Drenlin
Active Member
...actually, it's about the 4th one I've gotten, and quite possibly the oldest, lol. My dad's workplace disposes of old computers for people, but I always get a shot at making them work first. This one is/was an old HP Pavilion with a 733MHz Celeron, a total of 320MB of RAM(256+64), a 20GB "quantum Fireball" hard drive, and a read-only cd drive.
Oh, and Windows ME.
Turns out, it had a bad PSU. I had a spare mATX PSU from a newer Pavilion, but this old thing was even tinier. Comparison:
And so the fun begins:
To start off with, I stripped the case down to see how much room it had overall. This is it with the mobo tray and floppy drive cage removed:
That apparatus in the middle prevented the new PSU from going in, so after some work with a Dremel, I ended up with this:
I got a hole drilled in the back that, in addition to a pre-existing one, allows a the new PSU to be mounted. Unfortunately it started to rain as I was about to widen the hole in the back, so out came the tin snips. Not the prettiest thing ever but it works:
With that taken care of, I moved on to the guts. These old celerons have semi-unlocked multipliers, apparently. Sadly the heatsink on this is awful, though it does have a CM/Delta fan, however tiny it may be:
I didn't have a better one, so I improvised. The fan has a large hub relative to the HS, and I noticed that there was little dust(and therefore airflow) in the middle, so I used some cardboard and made a pseudo-shroud to separate them a bit:
After that, I replaced a lot of parts:
-Dial-up modem -> TrendNet 100mbps ethernet card
-Onboard Graphics -> Geforce2 MX 400(PCI)
read-only CD drive -> CDRW/DVD ROM drive
20GB WinME HDD -> old 40GB Caviar(complete with ubuntu 9.10)
64MB ram Stick -> 128MB ram stick (total 384)
(I also used the plug where the PSU fan used to go to install a small fan to circulate air. The floppy drive/cage was left out.)
This is it with all the parts in:
So here it is now. The former owners also left a CRT, some passive speakers, and a keyboard(not shown) that all look like they've never been used. To give you an idea of how small this thing is, that CRT is only a 15".
I have yet to get the network card working, but so far it's pretty snappy for a decade-old computer! I haven't overclocked it yet, but I'm hoping to hit 800MHz, which is supposedly the maximum allowed by this motherboard. Basically just upping the multi by 1.
Oh, and Windows ME.
Turns out, it had a bad PSU. I had a spare mATX PSU from a newer Pavilion, but this old thing was even tinier. Comparison:
And so the fun begins:
To start off with, I stripped the case down to see how much room it had overall. This is it with the mobo tray and floppy drive cage removed:
That apparatus in the middle prevented the new PSU from going in, so after some work with a Dremel, I ended up with this:
I got a hole drilled in the back that, in addition to a pre-existing one, allows a the new PSU to be mounted. Unfortunately it started to rain as I was about to widen the hole in the back, so out came the tin snips. Not the prettiest thing ever but it works:
With that taken care of, I moved on to the guts. These old celerons have semi-unlocked multipliers, apparently. Sadly the heatsink on this is awful, though it does have a CM/Delta fan, however tiny it may be:
I didn't have a better one, so I improvised. The fan has a large hub relative to the HS, and I noticed that there was little dust(and therefore airflow) in the middle, so I used some cardboard and made a pseudo-shroud to separate them a bit:
After that, I replaced a lot of parts:
-Dial-up modem -> TrendNet 100mbps ethernet card
-Onboard Graphics -> Geforce2 MX 400(PCI)
read-only CD drive -> CDRW/DVD ROM drive
20GB WinME HDD -> old 40GB Caviar(complete with ubuntu 9.10)
64MB ram Stick -> 128MB ram stick (total 384)
(I also used the plug where the PSU fan used to go to install a small fan to circulate air. The floppy drive/cage was left out.)
This is it with all the parts in:
So here it is now. The former owners also left a CRT, some passive speakers, and a keyboard(not shown) that all look like they've never been used. To give you an idea of how small this thing is, that CRT is only a 15".
I have yet to get the network card working, but so far it's pretty snappy for a decade-old computer! I haven't overclocked it yet, but I'm hoping to hit 800MHz, which is supposedly the maximum allowed by this motherboard. Basically just upping the multi by 1.
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