I recently upgraded from my five year old pc to an HP Pavilion.
Yesterday, I found an HP media center PC m1180n by the dumpster. The hard drive is missing, but I strongly suspects it works fine (No obvious damage, not stripped of DVD RW drives or ram, etc).
First, are HP’s good computers?
Second, how do I remove that big greenish plastic doohickey on the side of the drive bays? It has instructions on it, but I can’t figure them out.
The m1180n takes a propietary hard drive. Anybody know how much they run? Or can I mod it to take a standard drive?
Any other advice you can give is appreciated.
HP is fine as far as mass-market PCs go. They’re really no better or worse than Dell or Gateway. It looks like your machine has a 3ish GHz Pentium 4, so if you put XP on it it should be a decent enough browsing machine.
There’s no such thing as an OEM-proprietary hard drive, though. Do you mean the mounting bracket/rails are missing, or something else?
You’ll have to post a picture of the green piece you’re talking about. If it’s like some other HP/Compaqs I’ve worked on it’s part of the release mechanism for the front of the case.
I mean that the machine is designed with the hard drive connecting to a weird USB doohickey instead of the ribbon cable I’m used to. I assumed you had to buy a special drive that came with a USB connector instead of the standard pins.
Do the connectors look like this? http://www.pcstats.com/articleimages/200708/LGGSAH62N_sata2.jpg
Those are SATA connectors, which replaced conventional parallel ATA several years ago.
Meh. The newer ones are supposedly better than they used to be. The one you found is maybe even older than the one you just replaced.
I wouldn’t turn down a free computer but I wouldn’t spend a lot of money fixing it up. Not when you can buy a whole new machine for a couple hundred bucks.
no idea about this
HP still has a product support page up
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/product?product=432781&lc=en&cc=nl&dlc=nl&lang=nl&cc=nl
According to them the original hard drive was a 250gb, 7200 rpm SATA drive. You can buy a drive like that almost anywhere and it shouldn’t be too expensive. If you buy one OEM, make sure it comes with a spare SATA cord, unless the person who took the drive left that cord attached.
Not sure what’s up with the link to the product specs. Here’s a Bitly
http://bit.ly/bsEQUj
and here’s a different try at it
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00255702&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&lc=en&dlc=nl&cc=nl&lang=nl&product=432781
No. One connector is round and looks to be power (it looks lt like the female end of a wall wart adaptor) the other is a fat USB plug like so
—
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ETA that was in response to Cleophus question about connectors.
On either side of the two big things that look like guide/holder pins.
Mernieth
I haven’t got a few hundred bucks. I may have enough to get a new drive for this machine.
The set of connectors you see is probably for the “personal media drive” bay. It’s just a fancy way to connect an external USB drive. It’s definitely not for the main hard drive. The SATA connectors are in the lower right corner of the motherboard by this diagram. Depending on how aggressive the previous owner was at removing the HD, there may be other loose cables. Have you tried turning the machine on to verify it still works?
ETA: check your PMs.
I have to say. If you don’t have a few hundred bucks for a new computer. Throwing money at a machine you found in the garbage doesn’t seem like the greatest use of your cash. You buy a hard drive for 50 bucks stick the hard drive in and it doesn’t boot. So, you figure out it’s the power supply. You replace the power supply and it starts to boot. Ooops. Another error. Looks like there is a problem with the installed memory. You see how that can add up pretty quickly.
I don’t know. If you had a hard drive sitting around that you could stick in there it would seem worth it. But, going out to buy one that won’t work in any other machine you have doesn’t seem like a great plan.
Astro my gut tells me this computer works. I will of course, check first through various methods to be sure it’s good before I plunk down money on a new drive.
Second, I am currently chatting with Cleophus who says that the missing drive I describe is NOT the main drive. It’s an unnecessary external drive. He says I should be able to install one.
Third- My stand alone DVD burner died. I prefer to have a separate dvd player and computer so I can watch movies while I surf the net or play games. My mom sent me a replacement DVD player- but we accidentally threw out the remote while cleaning out Dad’s room after he died. The DVD has only a few buttons on it- a fraction of the amount on the remote.
So, I have to spend at least $10 (probably closer to $20) to get a new universal remote with DVD function.
If I’m going to be spending money anyway I prefer to go with the likely possibility of the media center. If I understand all the inputs right, I can use the HP media to transfer old family movies from VHS to DVD, have the computer output to a tv, vcr, or old Commodore monitor, and do lots of other stuff.
That looks like a Firewire port to me, FWIW
It looks like the power supply is bad.
When I plug the thing in, the power LED in the back flashes. When I press the power button, nothing happens. I looked in the manual. I tried disconnecting the power cord and holding the power button for five seconds. Nothing. I tried disconnecting the power cord and switching the voltage selector switch for five seconds. nothing.
So, it looks like I will be harvesting the DVD RW drive and other parts and returning the m1180n to the trash.
I’m stunned and disappointed that my gut feeling was wrong. I am generally a pessimist. But, I was really expecting this to work and looking forward to it.
Sorry this didn’t work out, DocCathode. Maybe if you keep an eye out on Craigslist you can find someone who just wants to unload a media machine.
For like $35-40 bucks you can replace that easily. I did it just last spring on my Pavillion m7167c.
I could. But, first I want to be sure the rest of the system works. Drives are easy enough to test. But, to be sure there isn’t a motherboard problem I think I’d have to put in a new power supply. Possibly, I could use the power supply from my Pavilion in the media to test it. If so, I have to think about how much trouble that would be, how likely it is I’d break something etc.
You know if you are getting a computer put together that is missing a hard drive, you are going to have to spend to get an operating system. I would suggest Linux Mint, it will run fine on a pentium 4 computer, you don’t have to do any fancy stuff to get media to work, and its free and comes with Open Office. Its pretty much a whole software package and operating system and it should be easy enough to figure out. My technophobe mom was using it the other day and thought it was windows.
My experience with the Pavilion I have is more or less meh. I’ve recently had to go back to using it temporarily until I replace the power cord for my newer system. I understand HPs are notorious for sleeping/waking issues–in a nutshell, they won’t restart when you try to wake them. I’ve looked and looked but never found an effective fix for that.
If anyone knows of or finds a solution for that, please PM me!
ETA:
This computer was pretty mediocre when I bought it, but it really didn’t ship with adequate RAM. I’ve quadrupled it so I now have 2G, which is still a little spare by today’s standards, but still it works pretty well for just about everything.
