One of my "hey can you fix this" moments
Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2011 12:31 pm
Co-worker buddy brought his PC to me, like most of my co-workers do when their PC acts up.
His chief complaint was it was really slow graphics playing movies and then the monitor quit. He knows the monitor is good as it was only couple years old and he tested it on his daughters PC. Ok, I'll take a look the on board vid may have died, if that's the case might be able to put a video card in and leg the system out some more. he also wanted to know if I could put a bigger hard drive and install windows 7 on it. Its an old HP of some kind, and I have seen boat anchors that are lighter. Rocking optical drives with headphone jacks and volume controls. So I pulled the HD/OD Drive cage from the front and seen the inside was packed with dust bunnies, whole whopping 256mb of RAM (in total across 4 sticks). Checked the hard drive and apparently I have worked on his PC before because it had one of my old hard drives in it (used to draw on my drives back in the day) so hard drive wasn't going to point to age. Contiuned to pull parts to clean out the bunnies and found my first clue to age, AGP slot. Not far from it the nVidia TNT2 on board chip so we are in the decade+ range for age. Well maybe its a little newer, whats the CPU... Winner Intel P3 900mhz, so 12ish years old. Dig the discoloration on the CPU die. There was next to no TIM left between the chip and passive heatsink.
The whole time I'm tearing it apart I cant help but shake my head and giggle to myself. He is standing next to me the whole time and then he say's "let me guess you are saying its not worth fixing" "I spent over $3,000 sure it can't be fixed"
gonna try and talk him into building a VERY simple little box, he didn't like it when i told him his phone had more horse power than his PC did.
Thought I would share my little trip down memory lane, and one of my "hey can you fix this" moments.
His chief complaint was it was really slow graphics playing movies and then the monitor quit. He knows the monitor is good as it was only couple years old and he tested it on his daughters PC. Ok, I'll take a look the on board vid may have died, if that's the case might be able to put a video card in and leg the system out some more. he also wanted to know if I could put a bigger hard drive and install windows 7 on it. Its an old HP of some kind, and I have seen boat anchors that are lighter. Rocking optical drives with headphone jacks and volume controls. So I pulled the HD/OD Drive cage from the front and seen the inside was packed with dust bunnies, whole whopping 256mb of RAM (in total across 4 sticks). Checked the hard drive and apparently I have worked on his PC before because it had one of my old hard drives in it (used to draw on my drives back in the day) so hard drive wasn't going to point to age. Contiuned to pull parts to clean out the bunnies and found my first clue to age, AGP slot. Not far from it the nVidia TNT2 on board chip so we are in the decade+ range for age. Well maybe its a little newer, whats the CPU... Winner Intel P3 900mhz, so 12ish years old. Dig the discoloration on the CPU die. There was next to no TIM left between the chip and passive heatsink.
The whole time I'm tearing it apart I cant help but shake my head and giggle to myself. He is standing next to me the whole time and then he say's "let me guess you are saying its not worth fixing" "I spent over $3,000 sure it can't be fixed"
gonna try and talk him into building a VERY simple little box, he didn't like it when i told him his phone had more horse power than his PC did.
Thought I would share my little trip down memory lane, and one of my "hey can you fix this" moments.