"Nibby" (nibby68)
07/18/2017 at 20:36 • Filed to: RETRO
7
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"Nibby" (nibby68)
07/18/2017 at 20:36 • Filed to: RETRO | 7
| 30 |
Got an HP Pavilion 7270 today. Specs are exactly as it says on there, looks completely original. Pentium 166MHz, 16MB EDO RAM, 2.5GB hard drive, 2MB onboard S3 graphics, some proprietary HP sound card with an ESS chip, Windows 95 on the original hard drive too.
Was pretty scratched up
Front and rear plates removed
yucky old dust
More dust and such. The fan cover had all sorts nearly black decade+ old dust on it. Fun fact, the case had a date imprinted on it, 7-18-1996. Exactly 21 years today.
All cleaned up! Magic eraser and sand paper. I used an air compressor to dust out the inside and wiped down every surface with a lightly damp paper towel then dried up.
Rear plate is much improved.
Inside is clean! And with upgrades! 2xPCI, 5xISA
The hard drive and some addon cards
Closeup of video card which I will go into in a bit
Another glance at the inside.
These are the cards it came with, a 28.8K ISA modem (bottom) and some proprietary sound card. Don’t care for these.
The sound card uses a proprietary cable to connect to the motherboard directly instead of using an ISA slot. Weird.
The addon cards!
A Novell NE2000 ISA ethernet card clone.
Number Nine Imagine 128 Series II 4MB PCI video card
Other side of the Number Nine card... what’s that? A Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424 chip for use in MS-DOS! Pretty cool.
Creative Sound Blaster 16 with OPL3 YMF-262 chip and a Creative WaveBlaster II wavetable daughtercard. Note the manual volume wheel!
It came with a Quantum Bigfoot 3600RPM 5.25" 2.5GB hard drive. Slow as shit
Size comparison against a 2.5" SATA laptop hard drive
SLOWWWWWWWWWWWWW Bigfoot
A 2GB 5400RPM IBM hard drive that’s faster and quieter than the Bigfoot. Using this instead.
Also bumped up the RAM from 16MB to 64MB. Much better.
Boot screen
BIOS screen
BIOS screen 2
MS-DOS 6.22 memory management
Specs using NSSI under MS-DOS
Defragging the drive after setting up everything
Defrag done. Quickly.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11!
There ya have it, kids. A wonderful retro computer. Ordered a CF to IDE adapter + 4GB Compact Flash card so I can eventually dual boot (with the aid of a boot manager) Windows 95 and MS-DOS 6.22
promoted by the color red
> Nibby
07/18/2017 at 20:51 |
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How’s life in 1996?
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Nibby
> promoted by the color red
07/18/2017 at 20:52 |
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pretty dope
also I love google books for finding old PC reviews and ads
jdrgoat - Ponticrack?
> Nibby
07/18/2017 at 21:25 |
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You might love the first desktop that we ever had when I was a kid, HP 7130P (if memory serves). It looked a lot like this one, but had another drive in the tower for scanning photos. A built in photo scanner. I once scanned a $100 bill, too.
Pentium 133MHz, 1GB HDD, 16MB RAM, 1MB video card, 6x CD drive, Win95. Yeah, it was boss.
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Nibby
> jdrgoat - Ponticrack?
07/18/2017 at 21:27 |
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Very cool! Do you still have it? Be fun to see if that front panel scanner still works
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jdrgoat - Ponticrack?
> Nibby
07/18/2017 at 21:42 |
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As far as I know, it’s still in the office. Along with the original “stuff” to it... keyboard, monitor with speakers that hung on the side, etc. Now you’ve got me curious if the scanner still works. I was hoping that you would want it, lol.
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Nibby
> jdrgoat - Ponticrack?
07/18/2017 at 21:46 |
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Well, I don’t want it considering I have a very similar system but it would be cool for you to play around with it a bit.
Aremmes
> Nibby
07/18/2017 at 21:53 |
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Whoa, an IBM hard drive that still works? Obviously not a Deathstar, then. Those all gave up the pixie dust a loooong time ago.
That sound card looks nice. Creative never made great products — nothing like a Gravis Ultrasound from them — but their wavetable stuff worked great with DOS games once the MPU-401 emulation driver was loaded. I bet it’d play X-Wing very nicely.
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Nibby
> Aremmes
07/18/2017 at 22:00 |
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GUS are stupid expensive these days, though it would’ve been cool to have one. I got the wavetable working nicely in MS-DOS, Windows 3.11 as well. DOOM sounds great
PS9
> Nibby
07/18/2017 at 22:37 |
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Oh man. That computer isn’t even that old, and yet everything you can get today is literally lightyears ahead of it. Your average 4Ghz CPU is baseline 25x faster than that 166Mhz pentium. Per core. So, more like 100x faster for multi threaded apps. Then we have to factor in 20 years or so of architectural improvements, so it’s something like 200x faster. INSANE.
I hope I live to see the first 100 core chip hit the market.
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jdrgoat - Ponticrack?
> Nibby
07/18/2017 at 22:43 |
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I’ll see what I can see when I’m at my parents’ next.
JGrabowMSt
> Nibby
07/18/2017 at 23:05 |
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ISA for the win, but no SECC....
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Nibby
> PS9
07/18/2017 at 23:12 |
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SOON
I think they have 22 core ones
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Nibby
> JGrabowMSt
07/18/2017 at 23:16 |
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I have an Optiplex GX1 for sale on ebay
fintail
> Nibby
07/19/2017 at 11:32 |
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Best part - the original spec sticker.
jimz
> Nibby
07/19/2017 at 11:32 |
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EDO RAM? Man, you live on the cutting edge!
The sound card uses a proprietary cable to connect to the motherboard directly instead of using an ISA slot. Weird.
IIRC the sound hardware was built onto the motherboard; that thing just breaks out the audio and MIDI ports since they didn’t apparently have room for them on the main board.
TheRealBicycleBuck
> Aremmes
07/19/2017 at 11:33 |
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I had a Gravis Ultrasound back in the day! It may still be in one of the computers in the attic. It was a real pain when I first bought it. Driver compatibility took some time to shake out.
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Nibby
> jimz
07/19/2017 at 11:46 |
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That’s likely the scenario
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Nibby
> fintail
07/19/2017 at 11:47 |
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All original, even the Bigfoot had an original install
TheTurbochargedSquirrel
> Nibby
07/19/2017 at 11:48 |
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I don’t remember ever seeing the spec sticker still on someone’s computer but now I see them everywhere on retro PCs. It’s a conspiracy I say!
Chariotoflove
> Nibby
07/19/2017 at 11:54 |
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What are you going to do with it now that it’s cleaned up?
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Nibby
> Chariotoflove
07/19/2017 at 12:23 |
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Still working on it!
Joe Patroni
> Nibby
07/19/2017 at 14:20 |
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SimCity for Windows!
BigBadSubaru
> Nibby
07/19/2017 at 14:25 |
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My dad bought my mom that exact same computer when I was in high school, I was totally jealous (I was rocking a 486 DX2-66 overclocked to 80 mhz with like 32 megs of ram and a 500 MB hard drive at the time, barely ran Doom in full screen...), it still worked perfectly fine in 2002 or 2003 when Dad bought her a newer one with a Pentium 4 :-P Which she happily plugged along with until 2006 or so when Dad got her a Dell Dimension E510, which had a motherboard failure about 6 years ago, replaced that with a off-lease Core i3 Optiplex she’s still rocking (I don’t remember what happened to the 7270, the second Pavilion went to one of the neighbors so he could use some guitar software that only ran on XP) and the Dimension is in my garage awaiting recycling since I doubt I’ll bother to fix the motherboard.
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Nibby
> Joe Patroni
07/19/2017 at 14:55 |
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SOON
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Nibby
> BigBadSubaru
07/19/2017 at 14:57 |
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Those were all nice upgrades. Make sure your mom has an SSD in her current machine
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fintail
> Nibby
07/19/2017 at 22:31 |
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That would have been a competent machine in 1996.
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Nibby
> fintail
07/20/2017 at 08:48 |
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It is quite competent in 2017
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BigBadSubaru
> Nibby
07/20/2017 at 12:49 |
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I don’t know if it does or not, she really only uses it for email and shopping so she’d likely not even notice the speed increase :-P I have SSDs in all my laptops though, it’s amazing how much they’ll speed up an older machine, especially if it had a chunky 5400 rpm drive in it :-P (IIRC mom’s desktop has a 7200 or a 10,000, it’s pretty quick for an i3)
ANON
> Nibby
01/13/2018 at 21:45 |
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Brings back memories. I had the 7200 variant which had a built-in photo scanner (where the spec sticker is on this blog - our spec sticker was beneath the power and HDD lights). Same specs otherwise. Heck, still have the recovery disc for it and the Windows 95 disc, key, and manual. Got the system new in New Zealand for ~US$3000 at the time with a HP 15'’ CRT display with built-in speakers and mic, AND it came with a HP Deskjet 400 which itself came bundled with Microsoft’s Monster Truck Madness. My kindergarten years in a nut-shell. And as mentioned by others, it was a beast of a computer performance-wise at the time.
Eventually modded it with a 4GB HDD to use in a business. Ran 95 fine with internet access right up until XP debuted. I still have the 2.5GB Quantum drive around (with the original OS) and love the sound the thing makes when firing up.
Parents threw the HP out in 2004 because it was taking up space. Had I been kept in the loop I’d have taken it home and kept it running for HP’s Entertainment Pack (all those retro software and games...)
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Nibby
> ANON
01/14/2018 at 08:07 |
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This is awesome. You should be able to find a similar era system for cheap... Are you still in NZ? I can help you find one.