Shit I've bought from eBay... #6 - HP MS228UK AiO Desktop PC

[Novaer]

What use is an all in one PC, especially by HP of all OEMs?
Watching YouTube or listening to music in the Kitchen, of course. Naturally.

I found this one whilst browsing on eBay. It was marked down as broken; specifically “The Screen is Cracked” but it otherwise powered up. It included everything internally - HDD, RAM, processor, etc. But did not come with a power pack.

There was no excitement with this one, I put down a maximum bid of £20, with the intention of taking it up to £30, and I pretty much won it at the end of the seven day listing for the listing price of £5 +£8.99 Shipping. Although I knew I would need to make other purchases, so £13.99 is not all I paid for it.

Honestly I was surprised to have won it as over the last few days I kept getting bid sniped on everything (Where someone comes in and put in a bid with a few seconds to spare so you can’t react to it) so I didn’t expect to win it. But I did and I was ecstatic. Immediately after paying I put in a call to a well known supplier of odds and sods of computer parts to see what kind of deal he could offer me for a HP Pavilion AiO LCD Panel; after taking the part number, he told me he could get one for £39.99. I thought that, that was a reasonable price, but I said that I was going to do some shopping around first. Credit to this supplier: He did say that if I can find a cheaper price to contact him and he’ll see what he can do.

A few days later I found one for £17.49 on eBay; that was pulled from a fully working MS215UK model HP AiO PC. Now these OEM computers sometimes use the same components as similar models, such as it were I found out via HP’s Partsurfer that the same LCD Panel is used in the MS215UK as the MS228UK and a handful of other HP AiO’s. It was a risk; but I decided that it was worth going for it.

After I had gotten the AiO, I noticed that there was no power supply; so I needed to shop around for one. I found an aftermarket one for £10.49 and after testing it on the computer I was able to turn it on. However my problems started with it, which I will explain later. So I went and purchased a genuine power supply for £22.90, and I have sent off the aftermarket one back to the seller for a refund.

There are several items that made this possible.

Item: HP Pavilion MS228UK All in One Desktop PC

• Price I paid: £5.00
• Shipping: £8.99 (Courier)
• Total Cost: £13.99
• Came With: An entire family’s private data including pictures, bank information, passports, password files, pay slips, tax information, memes and music.

Item: HP Pavilion AIO MS215 LCD panel

• Price I paid: £17.49
• Shipping: Free (Courier)
• Total Cost: £17.49
• Came With: Enough bubblewrap that @Neptune will be happy for a while.

Item: HP Part Number: ‘594294-001’ Power Supply

• Price I paid: £10.49 REFUNDED
• Shipping: Free (Royal Mail)
• Total Cost: £10.49 REFUNDED
• Came With: UK Mains (Clover Power Cord)

Item: Genuine Original HP Compaq 594294-001 90W SMART AC PSU

• Price I paid: £22.90
• Shipping: Free (Royal Mail)
• Total Cost: £22.90
• Came With: Nothing.

Grand Total Cost: £54.38

As you can see from the above image; I was successful in repairing the AiO PC. I am quite confident at repairing computers and I have been doing off and on for over two decades. My first computer that I repaired was when I was five or six years old; and it was at school. The school teachers knew I was great with computers - it seemed to be this ‘Natural Talent’ I had, and I remember telling them frankly “I get on with computers better than I get on with people.” Which is still true today. I had always owned a computer (My first ever being a Basic Amstrad CPC464) so when I was presented with a C drive error and my teacher had no idea what was wrong with the computer, I told her that I could fix it; I knew how to put Windows into DOS and perform a ‘Scandisk’ of the C drive; which found errors and fixed it. When the computer booted up afterwards it worked perfectly. In my primary school after this incident; I became the primary school’s defacto IT technician as they didn’t have a real one; and back then things were much simpler. If there was a problem with a computer somewhere in the school; that teacher would end up sending a student to come to the class with a note to the teacher, and I’d be excused to go fix it, although I always had time limits (10 Minutes, 20 minutes, etc). This all changed when a new headmaster came in, and I don’t think this headmaster liked me very much; but that’s a different story. My point is; from a young age I’ve been learning and studying computers. Playing around with them at home trying to break and repair them on a software level and learn how they work. Reinstalling Windows, and DOS, playing around with the various settings and such. Back then there was no Internet in the house so I had to teach myself everything.

It’s precisely those lessons that I applied here, I have a set of diagnostic steps which I use to identify and repair faults, then I fix them. For a start on the listing I knew the screen was cracked - common fault on LCD monitors. Usually this is caused by a person; especially if the screen is cracked. I knew that there is no point in repairing the actual panel; it’d need to be replaced. I have never had a HP AiO before; so I opened it up.

First of all I opened the two panels on the back - one was for the RAM, the other was for the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) but had a screw in there that held the CD drive in place. I ejected that and set this components aside; I took the HDD out of it’s caddy and put it into a hotswap bay on my PC only to discover that it had a full Windows installation on it.

OH DEAR. OH DEAR… We’ll come back to that.

Going back to the actual computer now; when I finally got it opened, I was presented with a shocking display:

The whole system was caked in dust, and I knew instinctively that if this thing had an integrated GPU; on the same copper pipe as that one heat sink (Which I could already tell was infinitely likely) then there was going to be a problem with the GPU on this, which is a common fault caused by overheating that the original XBOX360 owners will know all too well.

Opened up the metal panel cover the motherboard, disconnected the fan and then unscrewed it before pulling it away from the board. I was then able to see how clogged the heatsink was:

Yeah - that’s not a good thing. There is very few fins that the air can escape through. On top of that, dust can be an insulator; and that coupled with heat is not good. I thought for sure - this computer is going to have suffered overheating damage. This wasn’t good. I was not going to boot this up in this state. Taking this off of the motherboard was an absolute pain in the arse to be quite honest with you.

The problem is, is that it was practically glued onto the CPU. There was such a tight seal between the two with the thermal paste between them which had hardened that I actually delidded the AMD processor under it, which I did finally remove it. I cleaned up all the thermal paste that was on it and replaced it immediately with Arctic Silver 5 (Including the processor chip under the IHS), and then cleaned the heat sink with some compressed air, and an old tooth brush with Isopropyl Alcohol to clean it up. When I was satifiied I attached it back to the board and then I looked at the fan, and took it apart.

The fan was in a shocking state as well. I’ve cleaned up desk fans before and I’ve noticed with all of them that if there is a lot of dust built up on the blades, the amount of air that they push out seems to be diminished. If they’re cleaned up they noticeably push out a lot more air. I haven’t scientifically tested this, but it is something I have noticed, and I wonder if the same principle applies here.

Here is it after just a basic cleaning:

I finished up on it and made it look as good as brand new.

Taking a look at the motherboard; I could see no obvious signs of capacitor wear and tear; nothing exploded or bulging:

But I did notice that as I suspected the GPU was on the same heat pipe as the the CPU, all on one heat sink… Oh boy.

1. USB Ports
2. Ethernet Port (I think it only does 100Mbps, I’m not sure)
3. Power Port
4. SATA
5. Wireless Card
6. SD Card
7. RAM Slots (4GB Max, DDR2)
8. Central Processing Unit
9. Graphics Processing Unit
10. Monitor Connection

I knew straight away that the GPU was going to be iffy and would need reflowing (The act of heating up the chip to ‘reflow’ and refresh the solder) which was extremely risky. In everything I had tried this on, I had failed and made things worse - I had NEVER successfully reflowed/reballed a chip a before… So I was hoping that I didn’t have to.

I didn’t take any pictures replacing the screen; but needless to say it was a tedious and careful process. I had to remove a lot of screws and connections, and carefully note what I had done so I could reverse it when I wanted to put everything back together again.

Taking my time, and being as careful as I could, I attempted for the first time ever to put in the screen; and when I did it and had almost everything back together, I breathed a sigh of relief. I powered on the machine and saw!

Nothing.

The power light came on, the fan span up, but then everything went dead, the power light was still on and it was powered up, but nothing appeared on screen. SHIT! I thought. I then tried to diagnose the problem, and according to a HP forum post I read this was likely to be a power pack failure.

At this point I was using the after-market power pack and I tested the power output through an AMECal ST-9905 (As used by BigCliveOnline, one of my favourite YouTubers) and found that the output voltage was at 16.32 and dropping (The last test I did with it, it was at 14.59V). The computer needs 19V to operate, and the amperage needs to be 4.79A which surprise - surprise this Power Supply wasn’t and was all over the place.

Not acceptable.

I started a refund and returns for this power supply and got a genuine HP one which took some finding as they’re quite difficult to come by at a reasonable price nowerdays. When that arrived I plugged in it; and booted it up.

The screen came on, and everything seemed to work, for a moment. Then everything went dead again. There was another problem; and after a lot of diagnosing and avoiding what I knew in the back of my mind to be true, I came to the conclusion that the GPU needed to be reflowed… I don’t own a heat gun…

I do however own one of these bad boys from my weed smoking days:

Let there be fire

It’s basically a lighter that’s more like a fucking mini-blow torch. Risky… Very fucking risky. This has the tendency of quickly setting fire to things, and so I wanted to be extremely careful with it. Turning it on, I ran it over the chip for thirty seconds, making sure to keep it moving, and not too close to the chip as I moved it around making sure to cover each part of the chip equally. Afterwards; I hovered my hand over it afterwards to feel that it was hot, but I did not touch it - and nor should I. I let it cool down on it’s own without touching it any further for the duration of an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation and put the heat sink back on…

Oh I also replaced the HDD with a WD Black 1TB Drive, and installed Windows 10 Home.

The result:

It worked. To be clear though it only works with the Genuine HP Power Pack; the other power pack has the same problems I described earlier. Therefore I can deduce that the aftermarket brand Power Pack is not fit for purpose. I installed Windows 10 Home, and spent some time setting up the machine, which will be in our kitchen so we can watch things on YouTube, or BitChute whilst we’re in the kitchen - or have music playing.

So now I’ve been through the repairs, and this machine is 100% operational again, let's get right into this shall we?

• CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 250u
  • AM2+, 45nm Chip
  • K10 Microarchitecture (64 bit)
  • Dual Core @ 1.60GHz
  • L1 Cache
    • 2 x 64 KB 2-way set associative instruction caches
    • 2 x 64 KB 2-way set associative data caches
  • L2 Cache
    • 2 x 1 MB 16-way set associative caches
  • 24.9W Typical Power Consumption (25W TDP)
  • 4GB Max Supportable RAM*
• Chipset: AMD RS780M + AMD K10 IMC (Northbridge) and AMD SB700/710 (Southbridge)
• RAM: 4GB DDR2 (2 x 2GB)
  • 2x SK Hynix (2GBN Each)
    • Non-ECC RAM
    • Bandwidth: PC2-6400 (400 MHz, DDR2)
    • Timings:
      • @ 400 MHz 6-6-6-18 (CL-RCD-RP-RAS) / 24-51-3-6-3-3 (RC-RFC-RRD-WR-WTR-RTP)
      • @ 333 MHz 5-5-5-15 (CL-RCD-RP-RAS) / 20-43-3-5-3-3 (RC-RFC-RRD-WR-WTR-RTP)
      • @ 266 MHz 4-4-4-12 (CL-RCD-RP-RAS) / 16-34-2-4-2-2 (RC-RFC-RRD-WR-WTR-RTP)
    • Model: HMP125S6EFR8C-S6
• Optical Media: HP DVD A DS8A4LH SATA CdRom Device
  • Firmware: DHD5
  • Can read:
    • CD-ROM
    • CD-R
    • CD-RW
    • DVD-ROM
    • DVD-R
    • DVD-RW
    • DVD+R
    • DVD+RW
    • DVD-RAM
    • DVD+R DL
    • DVD+R9 DL
  • Can Write:
    • CD-R
    • CD-RW
    • DVD-R
    • DVD-RW
    • DVD+R
    • DVD+RW
    • DVD-RAM
    • DVD+R DL
    • DVD+R9 DL
• Network Cards:
  • Qualcomm Atheros AR5007EG Wireless Network Adapter (b/g only)
  • Realtek RTL8139/810x Fast Ethernet Adapter (10M/100M)
• Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics (Integrated)
  • No external output.
  • Upto 256MB shared memory
• PSU: 1 x External “Laptop Style” Genuine Original HP Compaq PSU (594294-001) 90W
  • Model 594294-001
• HDD: 1 x 1TB (Originally: WDC WD5000AAKS-65V0A0, 500.1 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA II)
  • WDC WD10 EALS-002BA0 SATA Disk Device (1 TB, 7200 RPM, SATA-II)
• Monitor: (Reportedly) Samsung LTM185AT01 (18.5”), but is actually a AUO M185XW01 V2 (18.5”)
• Sound: Realtek High Definition Audio (ESS1869 Chipset, I believe)
• Stereo 2x 2W Internal Speakers (Built in)

Remember when I said that we’d come back to what I found on the hard drive? Yeah; we’ll let's talk about that shall we?

So I rebooted my computer and booted into that windows installation to see that it was Windows 10 Home, upgraded from Windows 7. The user account that logged in, which I will call ‘User 1’ didn’t have a password so I was in - instantly. I then discovered that the hard drive seemed to be taking a long time to do anything. It was at that point I decided to terminate the session as I believed I was looking at a dying hard drive. Long story short: I was correct. I rebooted back into my Windows 10 and took ownership of the /users/ folder, then copied off to my hard drive; I then ran a file recovery program on it, and recovered a massive payload of deleted files that had not been overwritten.

Whilst this was doing that, I had a look at the files I copied over to my hard drive; and oh deary me… This hard drive wasn’t even formatted before being sent to me. In the Users Folder I found five (5) different user accounts; User 1, User 2, User 3, User 4, Admin 1 (I’ve removed the names), and I have permission to share the details of what I found in there, and what happened.

In total I recovered 38GB of information from the drive.

I didn’t find any porn; or porn collections but I’ve not fully gone through everything. What I have gone through and seen on this hard drive is the following:

• Lots of family pictures and selfies, including pictures of people using this very computer.
• Bank information, such as sort codes, account numbers, card numbers and pin numbers for those cards.
• Scans of passports
• Unencrypted text files containing: Passwords
• Pay Slips
• Tax information
• Tame Memes
• One or two spicy memes
• Music
• Documents
• Homeworks, coursework information and so on.
• Pirated Movies
• Internet Browsing Histories of 5 people
• Autocomplete passwords access
• Their contact information (Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers, Email Addresses, etc)

This is why I left the feedback:

And no I won’t be doing that, I'm not that sad.

Within this treasure trove of information I found the names, addresses and phone numbers (And even a passwords text file) of the family and made contact with them. Yes; I called them up, and spoke to the father, which was quite risky. I asked if I could have five to ten minutes of his time, and that I wasn’t trying to sell him anything or do market research. He agreed and I thanked him. I then explained to him why I had called…

I told them that I had brought this computer off of eBay and described the computer to him; I told him that all of their data was still on it's hard drive. The man wasn’t very happy - and I don’t blame him at all. He told me that they had an an accident something got knocked over and smashed into the screen, and they took it to a repair shop to get it repaired. However… They were told that it was beyond economical repair, that it wouldn’t be worth repairing the PC, but they will if they wanted them to; it’d just cost £199.

The father went home to discuss this with his family, however when he got home he found his son setting up a brand new PC that he had brought with his own money (I think he was the one who broke it) to replace the broken one for the whole family to use.

Now that’s sweet, isn’t it? A young person taking personal responsibility for his actions. You don’t see that too often nowadays.

So the father went back to the repair shop and told them “Categorically”, to "Destroy the Hard Drive, and dispose of the PC as you see fit". So to find out this after the fact; you can imagine that they were not happy with the shop to say the very least, and I can’t blame them.

The family were not aware that their PC was sold on eBay either!

I told them that I would be very happy to send the files back to them, via a flash drive in the post - completely free of charge, and I confirmed their address, however they wanted it sooner and so it was emailed to them instead. They were extremely happy that I was able to recover their files and I had sent it back to them, but the father (Admin 1) said it was a little surreal that I called out of the blue and offered to do something extremely kind. Meh; that’s the kind of person I am, I guess. I told them to change their bank pin, and debit cards and passwords as I had access to that information and if I did; whoever’s hands the computer has been in before I got it, could have it too. I also told them that I was able to repair it for about £20; and that this repair shop was nothing short of extortionists.  

I sent the files back to them and they have received it and thanked me. They even offered me money for my assistance (£100) which I have declined; although that would have completely paid for this PC and then some.

The hard drive after all this got completely corrupted; and it was clear that there was something going on under the hood. So I pulled up Crystal Disk Info:

Yikes. 9,773 pending sectors (9,773 * (Sector Size(4096 bytes)) / 1024 = KB / 1024 = MB = 38.17578125MB of the drive is unstable) and 15 uncorrectable sectors. I would not use this hard drive for anything at all. Still - I zero wiped it twice and this didn’t change. So I’m inclined to believe that this drive is on its way out. I will not be selling it - so I might play around with it, or take it apart for the magnets, and assign it to physical destruction (I have a place that I can go to that allows you to chuck them into this giant shredder.)

I want to urge everyone here; if you’re selling your computer/laptop then please at least do a proper format (Not a Quick Format), or worse yet don’t just *delete* your files or “Restore Windows from a Factory Image” and call it job done, it most certainly isn’t. Do not be lazy about this. Overwrite that data. So assholes like me can’t come along and recover it; I really can’t stress that enough. In most cases a single pass of random bits will do, but if you want to be sure, 3 passes like with the DoD 5220.22-M is usually a good idea, but if you’re a little paranoid, a 7 pass write like DoD 5220.22-M ECE I guess is alright. But if you’re extremely paranoid - just don’t sell the hard drive, and physically destroy it, and sell/give the rest of the computer. Chances are if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to be told that.

There are far worse people out there and I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve purchased second hand hard drives online, that people haven’t properly formatted the hard drives of. I’ve had access to various kinds of sensitive materials that have either been too hot to handle or have been wiped properly by myself. But the stuff I will talk about openly is that I’ve also had access to a company’s customer database which included names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card information of their customers. But most commonly I’ve had access to people's private and personal files, and in one case I got access to someone’s private porn library. Even if you’re taking your computer to a repair shop and tell them to dispose of it- as for the hard drive back! Don’t trust them with it! This is exactly why you shouldn’t.

To see someone actually take data protection seriously and to wipe their drives before selling them is a good thing to me. I actually like that they do it properly. But I always format again; just to be sure, it roots out any bad sectors, and makes sure that the drive is properly cleaned and conditioned, ready for use. You don’t need to use the Gutmann method (35 pass write) because that is most certainly overkill.

For more information you can read the following:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence 
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_forensics 
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure 
• https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html - Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory (Floppy/Tape/HDDs)
• https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~astubble/600.412/s-c-papers/remanence.pdf - Data Remanence in Semiconductor Devices (Flash/SSDs)

Due to the fact that this drive was dying I put a 1TB HDD that I had spare. I thought it was a WD Black; but apparently it’s a Blue. Which is strange because the label is black. Hence the assumption. Either way I think it’s only capable of SATA II, so it’d be a waste of time putting in a SATA III drive.

Despite HP’s reputation for overheating; when I ran AIDA64, and told it to stress the CPU, FPU, Cache and System Memory, I couldn’t get it past 40-45oC. I don’t think any thermal throttling was going on either. The air coming out of the top of the device was pretty much cool and the system was running fine without breaking a sweat. In fact I was concerned that the stress test wasn’t even running. Strangely however despite that kind of temperature the cores of the CPU seemed to be running at about 20-25oC which is about a 20oC (50%) difference to the rest of the CPU. I’m not really sure what was going on here, as I’ve never worked with AIDA64 before. But Prime95 and Speedfan, as well as HWInfo produced the same data. Apparently the maximum operating temperature of the CPU is between 55°C - 81°C so to get what I’m getting - I consider that to be extremely good.

I know the CPU is vastly underpowered (25W) but that is incredible results to me. Especially for a a HP. By this point I had already refreshed the thermal past of the CPU and GPU; when I repaired it. But this is actually highly encouraging. It’s a shame I can’t overclock the CPU. CPUID doesn’t display correctly for this either. The Socket has AM2 printed on it, the CPU is AM2+ (Or AM2 Revision 2) and yet CPUID reports it as AM3:

This small CPU clock of 1.6GHz pretty much reminds me of the crappy netbooks that was quite popular about about ten or so years ago, and the computer does struggle from time to time especially when things are loading up, but that could be a hard drive bottleneck as well as in Task Manager I’d frequently see the HDD activity stuck on 100%, and the CPU would be fine. It might be something I consider later, buying a cheap SSD to slap in there so that it boots up quickly and we can truly use it as a PC-TV. That said it seems to be able to run videos be that from YouTube, BitChute in 720p and the DVD Drive plays our Star Trek and Babylon 5 episodes just fine. So for the purpose I’m using it for, it’s fine.

EcchiDreams loads in the browsers, no problem too. So that’s also good. Although I’m not ever going to sign into EcchiDreams (Because my staff account is a high security account, and I’m not even allowed a duplicate account) and I do not consider this machine to be a high security machine.

For a start; doing a full disk encryption for the system drive is most certainly going to slow it down to a crawl. Secondly I can’t even put in a BIOS level password. Where I showed a picture of the motherboard, look carefully towards the edge of the motherboard in box 7; You can see two sets of two silvery looking contacts, one says “CLEAR PASSWORD” and the other says “CLEAR CMOS”. Instead of hiding this further into the board, where it can’t be easily accessed, all you need to do is remove the memory cover, and press on the two contacts to remove password with your screwdriver to clear the password and boom. Job done. You’re in. I don’t consider this to be a good thing, and is a prime example of convenience defeating security. As this has been designated a low security machine on my network, it doesn’t have access to any network resources such as any of the servers, or the NAS or our computers which means music and stuff needs to be manually loaded onto it via flash drives. It doesn’t have a username or password so you can just turn it on and it’ll go straight into Windows. The USB ports on this machine are all USB 2.0 from what I can tell, which means it’s capable of 480Mbps maximum and there are six USB ports on the device. Four on the back and two on the side.

It also has a built in SD Card reader; which I can honestly see using that instead of putting in DVD’s, or holding music libraries on that and having and SDCard case next to the computer as SDCards are dirt cheap nowadays.

We’ve got this computer set up in the kitchen so that we can watch videos, or listen to music whilst we’re cooking or cleaning up, or just to have a ‘Stereo’ of some sorts, but let's talk about the sound quality shall we?

It’s bearable, but compared to my dedicated set up with the Matrix Mini-i Pro and HE400s it’s fucking awful quality. Watching things that mainly have dialogue isn’t too bad, but music sounds tinny, and frankly like they’re coming out of a set of laptop speakers from 2009/2010. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected much considering A) It’s age B) What it was intended to be used for and C) It's not specialist equipment. Lol

Despite having a sticker over the webcam, I actually disconnected it and left it disconnected (On purpose) whilst I was in there, and I think it’s on the same board as the microphone which was connected too because it’s on the same cable. I’m that type of guy who covers these webcams (And front facing cameras on their phone) for a damn good reason. It is something I have done to every laptop I’ve ever owned, where it’s been included. So I haven’t tested these out, but I am sure if I did it’d be absolute dogshit; given that it’s a VGA Webcam so I expect it to be around 0.3 - 1.3 Megapixels, and it’s from around 2009/2010. It’s a Chicony CNFA09921004171LH (Model: HP CFNA099-A2) (Part: 537546-001) If you’re interested.

Do not count on this machine to play any games; it doesn’t have the processing capability or the graphics power that would be required.

All in all I can say that I like this machine and it will serve its purpose in the kitchen just nicely. What I don’t like about this machine, is that in order to clean out the heatsink and fan, you need to take the whole damn thing apart which isn’t all that easy. But it’s something I will do yearly. I do not want to let this PC overheat again, otherwise I’m going to potentially have to reflow the solder; again. Other than that it’s a neat little thing and everything is very well contained. In my experience I wouldn’t call the internals ‘Desktop Components’ but more like Laptop Components, that’s neither a plus or a negative for me, although it does limit its power. I suspect that I could replace the CPU with a 260u; but I probably won’t, and I don’t know if it can take more than 4GB of RAM; according to the CPU Spec - it can, but according to the PC Spec, it can’t. I don’t have other sticks of laptop sized DDR2 RAM so I can’t test it.

It goes to show that there is a use for these older machines today; although as an everyday working computer? Probably not.

I’ll close with some AIDA64 Benchmarks:

RAM

Memory Read: 8,934 MB/s
Memory Write: 5,811 MB/s
Memory Copy: 8,089 MB/s
Memory Latency: 97.9 ns

Central Processing Unit Benchmarks

CPU Queen Score: 5,809
CPU PhotoWorxx Score: 3,122 MPixel/s
CPU ZLib Score: 40.7 MB/s
CPU AES Score: 212 MB/s
CPU Hash Score: 524 MB/s

Floating Point Unit Benchmarks

FPU VP8 Score: 1,156
FPU Julia Score: 2,005
FPU Mandel Score: 1019
FPU SinJulia Score: 509

SIMD-enhanced Ray Tracing Benchmarks

FP32 Ray-Trace: 303 KRay/s
FP64 Ray-Trace: 160 KRay/s

Next on: "Shit I've bought from eBay" - Viglen Genie Ultra Small (2009/2010)

[Neptune]

It looks pretty nice in the kitchen  And it's nice to have something to watch while cleaning up and cooking. You did a good job with this one, @Temaelrin :3 

[Rucio, Emperor of Cheese]

My only question...

How long did the bubble wrap last?

[Whoreo]

On 23/04/2019 at 19:35, Neptune said:

It looks pretty nice in the kitchen  And it's nice to have something to watch while cleaning up and cooking. You did a good job with this one, @Temaelrin :3 

so it still works and shit? my cousin has one that he still uses as his main PC. he cleans it out once a year because like a good little HP machine it attracts dust like a bitch.

On 24/04/2019 at 04:42, Rucio said:

My only question...

How long did the bubble wrap last?

that's a good question, @Neptune how long did it last?

this was an interesting read, it's amazing you got it to work again. what are the current outstanding problems with it (if any), you mentioned that the CD drive is unejectable after you opened it up, have you been able to fix this yet? and what are you looking at upgrading? I'm fascinated. oh and what kind of speeds are you looking at with the SD card reader? my cousin's one doesn't even read SDcards anymore, so I can't really ask him.

[Neptune]

I still have some of the bubblewrap.... >.> some. 

[Novaer]

On 04/05/2019 at 07:31, Whoreo said:

so it still works and shit? my cousin has one that he still uses as his main PC. he cleans it out once a year because like a good little HP machine it attracts dust like a bitch.

that's a good question, @Neptune how long did it last?

this was an interesting read, it's amazing you got it to work again. what are the current outstanding problems with it (if any), you mentioned that the CD drive is unejectable after you opened it up, have you been able to fix this yet? and what are you looking at upgrading? I'm fascinated. oh and what kind of speeds are you looking at with the SD card reader? my cousin's one doesn't even read SDcards anymore, so I can't really ask him.

Hello, Whoreo. Sorry for getting back to you so late, I have done a test on the SD Card reader, and I have some interesting results. 

For the test, I used a Sandisk Extreme 128GB SD Card (Which the AIO could read and write to perfectly). This is the actual card:

Baseline (USB3) on my Main PC:

The Hard Drive (For Comparisons):

The SD Card in the SD Card Reader on the AiO:

So at that kind of speed, I suspect it's on a USB2 Interface, which makes sense considering the AiO is, I think a 2010/2011 model. The reason I picked this SD card was because I knew its full potential couldn't be tapped out with a USB2 interface, it had to be USB3. I know it's fast and reliable, because my camera (Canon 750D) can take continuous shots on it without slowing down due to the 6-7 FPS buffer, that it can write to the SD Card at impressively quick speeds. 

So I know it's a damn good card. Interestingly, it preformed better in the USB2 Interface SD Card reader when writing randomly than it did in my USB3 SDCard Read/Writer. But it's well within the margins of error. I'm actually impressed with the read/write speed of the SDCard reader on this AiO, considering. In random reads and writes, it outpreforms the mechanical hard drive, which is to be expected, but I didn't expect it to be of this degree.

I have not re-looked into the eject mechanism of the AiO at this time. It's on my todo list.