New Project: Free Trashed HP Rebuild

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Vegeta

Gawd
Joined
May 12, 2002
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595
Long story behind this one. Well, not really.

I went to get in my friend's after he offered me a ride. I walk past the bed and I see a computer laying in the bed, totally busted apart into many peices. It looked exactly like my own HP Pavilion 6653C. I asked waht the hell he had done to it and he went into a story about how his brother in law got fed up with it and it giving him problems so he orded a new Dell and told my friend to trash it. My friend proceeded to stick it in the backend of his truck and bash it with a hammer. Seriously. There was a huge as dent on the non-motherboard side ofhte cae, the top and front face was ripped off, the frotn by hte HD was bashed in, the CD rom was hit on top and bashed in with the front bezel and volume control broke complete off, the floppy drive was tottaly trashed, amoung other things.

So I 'take it off his hands' for him, thinking somehting may be good still. I get it home, strip it down, clean it up, and put it back in the chassis which actually didn't have a lot of dents in it (it was mainly the outer casing)
trash5.jpg

trash1.jpg


I hook it up to a monitor and keyboard, power it on (carefully making sure I wasn't touching it) and lo-and-behold, it worked. That's when I realised that an IDE cable was stopping the fan atop it's 466mhz Cleron from spinning. This this had been running off air cooling for like 30 minutes. And it hadn't fried yet! So I unclog the fan and go on with dissassembling the CD Rom.

I get it apart and several small peices of PCB and plasitc fall out. I trew them away and re-assembled the CD-rom after i got hte dents out. It was minus the bevel and hte CD Tray cover but I figured it might have hope. It worked. I swear to you, this this worked. It has a busted bottom PCB and some inner parts missing, but it works.

trash2.jpg


And so I reassemble everything And decide to clean up the HD. It seemed like a good working HD, reporting in at a little over 12GB total space. It had about 5GB used, the rest was free. I started deleting things. All spyware and P2P programs. Supposedly this was another problem causer and why he got rid of it. I got it down to the bare minimum of windows and the standard programs like Word and IE. Something like 10 GB free. So I start thinking MP3 Server. That will come later. First, I need to make a new case. I figure since the outer sheel is totaally out of commision I will rebuild a new outer shell out of plexi.... Keepign hte original chasis, only pained black. I cut a window in the motherboard tray showing off the underside of the Celeron's socket, IDE traces, and PCI slots. It looks pretty neat.

trash3.jpg


I got WCPUID on the thing and found out it was indeed a 466mhz Celeron. It has only 64 MB of ram, but that is plenty for running basic Winamp and some videos. It has a PCI sound/modem card (HP proprietary) that seems to work great. The CD Rom works and I plan on keeping it there for a while. Not sure yet if it is a burner or not.... there was some folders on the computer that said 'CD writer' but they were empty. From what my friend said it doesnt have one :(. It also has two open PCI slots and two rear USB 1.1 ports. The USB ports could be put to good use....

So these are the pics so far. I will post more when it nears completion. But hey it is a perfectly working computer for FREE. And to think at one time it cost around 1000$.
All I need is a network card for it and to buy myself a new hub and nice and easy home media network... just need some software to control it from this computer and I can set it right next to my surround reciver and TV. My current PC is already close but when I do alot of multitasking it tends to slow down. This way I can have MP3 software and such running on that comptuer and photoshop and such on this computer at the same time....
If anyone has any other good ideas for it's use let me know.
 
those things are a bitch to work on. have to open them up because that psu is in the way. i have big hands as well.

as far as ideas go. . .theres not much else i can think of besides mp3 server type things.
 
That shot of the case doesn't do it justice. it was MUCH MUCH worse... i used a hammer and a board to TRY to straighten it out. And the front and top bezel are made of platic and got thrown away because htey were so beat to hell (many small peices).

They are so hard to work on... and hte PSU wires are so short. The motherboard tray and backside comes off with only the removal of 4 screws though which reveals everything, cept the wires are so short you cant move it out too much without disconnecting them.
 
I think that when a computer like that was being sold, there were no $1000 computers, most were above that in cost. Great job on the repairs, it looked like a major piece of shit before, now it looks like a piece of shit that plays MUSIC, damnit.
 
Isn't that the $600 wal-mart black friday model from like 3 years ago? My friend has that exact computer.

I installed a replacement PSU for $20 after his shot blue sparks out the back of it....lol. Still up and running to this day!
 
I belive you could get these for around 998$ about 4 1/2 years ago, maybe more. I bought my HP 6653C in 2000 and it has 128MB of ram and a 533mhz Celeron. I don't know exactly which model this is but it has a 466mhz and 64mb of ram. I got my computer for about 900$ from wal-mart.

I'm seeing if my frieng can gank me some cheap network cards and a hub from the local college tommorow as his dad is a professor there... he always gets some cheap/free stuff from there. A month ago he got one of those nice blue and black stackable LinkSys 16-port hubs for free.. I don't know why, think it was just minus a power cord or something... we used it at a lan party last week.
 
Holy Sh*t HUGE ps!
AUGHHHHH
man that must have been hard to put back together... theres no room for anythingg
 
Originally posted by BiGWooDy
Holy Sh*t HUGE ps!
AUGHHHHH
man that must have been hard to put back together... theres no room for anythingg
Click to expand...
its not that big... you need to realize that the case itself is quite small. Only 2 cd drive bays. The power supply is just placed over the processor.
 
i would have had fun destroying that one... i wouldent have wasted my time putting it back together...
 
EDIT: Didnt realize it was my friend mashie -- sorry bud :-P

Anyways, its always nice to find good computers in the trash and use them for something
 
I would clean up the area in the bottom front so there is nothing there, pick up an mATX PSU, remove the casing and put it up front. That was the CPU will stay cooler and your plexi on the side won't be showing a fat piece of metal. You could just cover up the PSU hole with a small piece of plexi, too.
 
Ok I have been looking for some software that will allow me to control this thing over a network... something simple that will allow me to see it's HD as a network drive and vice versa, copy and move files to it, and then use winamp on it to play mp3's off either computer, while running the winamp controls from my computer.... I know.. sounds complicated... basically I need somehting on it that will let me use it as an extension of my computer.... just like it's HD is in my computer and so I can use it's spare proc cycles to run mp3's instead of tieing up this machine... basically it will be like a digital media server between this computer (the control) and my home theatre system.

Anyone know of such software other that VPN / virtual desktop stuff? Both PC's are on Windows 98SE....


Also this thing is hella loud. I can't seem to isolate the source of it but it puts out this high pitched whine like a jet engine that is 3x as loud as my HP which is almost exactly like it. They should sound the same. I'm thinking it could be the harddrive, which doesn't show any signs of failure anytime soon but it sure is loud... will the plexi covering deaden the noise any compared to the open case? Never built a case out of plexi before.
 
BrowseAmp is a plugin for winamp 2.x/5.0 that lets you control playback on the other computer via a web interface. It's pretty slick. Find it here . Just run Winamp5 on this old piece of junk with the plugin. It'll let you upload/download (IIRC), as well as cue up music on that machine.
 
that looks like it should work.
Now I need to decide weather I want to go buy a new 5 port hub and use it to network the two computers or just use a crossover cable. I like the idea of a hub more for future expansion. I will also need to invest in 2 new ethernet cards as my lsat one got fried in an electrical storm and this POS didn't come with one (?)
 
Get a router/switch, with wireless if you want. That extra firewall will be good for your karma, not to mention your boxes.
 
I don't really need a router/firewall... I'm on 56k and could care less about secuirty.

I don't really want to go the wireless route since I will want to use this equipment for lan partys and stuff too.

Now what I don't get is this BrowseAmp... does it stream the Mp3's to the reqesting computer over the network or does it just control the output of winamp on hte host computer? I need the latter. I need the mp3's to use the trash comp's soundcard and HD.
 
Did some more today, cut out some of the crappy bracing inside the case that served no purpose except to make the wiring cluttered. Also drilled a hole to mount the CD drive where it is instead of protruding out an inch from the case like it was (to reach out to front bezel). Heres a new pic:

wiring.jpg


Now all thats left is getting the network running and figuring out a way to make the "Select User" screen to stop appearing on boot. I tried deleting all the users, creating just one user, then installing tweakUI and selecting that Tweak UI type in user name and password on boot... still nothing. And its a weird boot screen, not like the normal win98 one that I'm familiar with. It has a selection list instead of just text boxes... more like Win2K.

If anyone knows how to get rid of it please let me know.
 
To get rid of the "select user" screen. Go to Network Properties and then there is a drop down box about half was down the menu, should default have "Client for Microsoft Windows" just drop down that menu and select "Windows Family Login" and that shoudl take care of it for you
 
Now what I don't get is this BrowseAmp... does it stream the Mp3's to the reqesting computer over the network or does it just control the output of winamp on hte host computer? I need the latter. I need the mp3's to use the trash comp's soundcard and HD.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what BrowseAmp does. Winamp 5 runs on the trashed computer, you use the web interface on another computer to tell the trashed computer what to play. The music comes out through the trashed computer's sound card.

It's also a pretty cool prank you can play on someone....if you can sneak the plugin onto their computer. They sit there, and all of a sudden it starts playing all sorts of random stuff.
 
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