Ex Office PC - HP D530.. Problems

[!bluetonic!]

Hello,

Work has 4 x HP d530 PCs that they no longer use.

They have been powering off at random intervals.

I took one home. It's a P4 2.66 with 1 Ghz RAM. I took another home and same problem.

I tried to install Debian on it. It kept powering off at different stages of the install process. When I say power off, the monitor goes to standby and the lights in side are still on. When you power cycle, it kicks into life again.

It has the latest BIOS on it.

Questions:

1) Does anyone else know of this problem and how to solve it? It would be great as a small quiet PC if we could get it to work.
2) If it's the PSU or MOBO that's bad, what are the options about using the components with something else. Are they any cheap SFF Barebones for a P4 with DDR RAM still about? I don't want to spend much at all.
3) Is P4 now considered old hat and people just disregard this historic technology?

 

[Growlingfish]

I tried to install Debian on it. It kept powering off at different stages of the install process. When I say power off, the monitor goes to standby and the lights in side are still on. When you power cycle, it kicks into life again.

Do they have onboard gfx or a card?

2) If it's the PSU or MOBO that's bad, what are the options about using the components with something else. Are they any cheap SFF Barebones for a P4 with DDR RAM still about? I don't want to spend much at all.

I'm sure someone is still selling Shuttles that take P4/DDR (I don't know the names of the right ones though); I know a few places that sell iDEQ Biostars that take P4/DDR for about £50 (search for ideq 220m, for example).

3) Is P4 now considered old hat and people just disregard this historic technology?

Mine still runs everything I want to perfectly well

 

[!bluetonic!]

Do they have onboard gfx or a card?

They do indeed. There is only one PCI slot on the bottom. I wanted to put my Wireless card in there, but do you think putting a PCI gfx card in will solve it? Good call for this thought though.

I'm sure someone is still selling Shuttles that take P4/DDR (I don't know the names of the right ones though); I know a few places that sell iDEQ Biostars that take P4/DDR for about £50 (search for ideq 220m, for example).

I have 2 x Shuttles at home and I really like them. 1 is an AMD board and the other an Intel. I will look into ideqs, ta.

Mine still runs everything I want to perfectly well

And so it should. I don't do anything cutting edge at home. I just wanted to toy about with a few linux distros without breaking my working PC.

Thank you Growlingfish.

 

[katana6434]

We have loads of HP D530's at work. We have had this problem with a fair few of them. They just keep turning themselves off. Eventually we have a couple that would not turn on at all.

According to HP is is caused by a faulty motherboard. Everytime we have had this problem at work we call HP and they send an engineer out to swap the motherboard. They have even fixed PC's that are out of warranty with this problem.

It might be worth giving HP a ring to see if they can help.

Cheers

 

[katana6434]

Should have said that i have only experianced this problem with the D530 SFF (Small Form Factor) model. All other models seem to be OK.

Cheers

 

[!bluetonic!]

It just seems such a shame to throw this hardware out.
They're small, quiet and would make good PCs for just tinkering with.
Ebay is an option, but I can't guarantee the parts work.

I think they're passed their warranty, so HP isn't an option.

As I said, there's a good enough chip inside.
I've had a brief look around for a useful barebones system to throw this into.
But for just something just for tinkering, £50 is too much when i've already got 3 other perfectly good PC's.

Thanks for your help though.

 

[katana6434]

Even if they are out of warranty it is worth giving HP a ring. As I said above, we have had about 4 of these go out of warranty and HP have replaced the motherboard each time. It's worth a go. They can only say no.