Restoration of the HP Business PC

Please make use of the google drive copy of this blog if the images do not load:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_FwbLanvcR22r7cwis_k9LLPNJWBueQ2dI2DVVYSN4c/edit?usp=sharing

Bringing life to a HP Business PC

Some people had wanted me to share this in a blog, so I have written this up and will update in the future with any future endeavors!

Recently I was able to find a faulty HP 285 G2 Mt Business PC for free on Gumtree along with 3x 1TiB HDDs & 2x 500GiB SSDs. After picking them up on Friday, I was able to check out the PC and see what's faulty about the PC.

(This was done alongside my sibling)

Immediately, it was visible that a power supply was missing and once the case was taken out, there was also a lack of GPU and rear fan. Fortunately, the CPU had built-in graphics and worked relatively well (except for games).

From taking a Power Supply Unit (PSU) from an old broken PC, we were able to hook it into the computer and through the amazing practice of find a hole that fits the plug, I was able to hook the power into the parts (CPU fan, motherboard, harddrives etc) and the computer booted into Windows 7 with 4GB RAM (I believe DIMM).

Even with a missing rear fan, the computer ran perfectly well for what it is and we were able to play Solitaire on the PC and rummage through the files.


As of now, the HP PC now has a functional PSU, upgraded 8gb ram, 16MB VRAM through DisplayPort display adapter.
Though, for £2 delivery with an £11 base price, there is an ebay listing in further mainland Europe for a graphics card that is also HP, allowing to fit the theme more, but more importantly, allow for the PC to have all of its main parts.

In the files was documents and work stuff from the previous owner - which I have now deleted and resisted opening - alongside some music downloaded from a youtube to mp3 converter along with some existing somewhere in the files that appear in Windows Media Player and not where his other music is - I'm too lazy to find it right now.

The spotify Windows 7 playlist was created through this.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6N0O6QV5k8SaoZENKr4hWg?si=6c1d9c0fe2914f17

We attempted to plug in Ethernet to learn that they had no drivers for it and weren't able to connect to the internet. To resolve this, we had attempted to plug in a Wifi Card and install the drivers through using my actual PC to download drivers for it and then put it on a USB within the HP PC. Once these were installed, it allowed me to open the Wifi section instead of showing that there is no wifi hardware, though, it was unable to connect to the internet (I had tried my 2.4Ghz mobile data alongside I believe 5Ghz home wifi). I'm unsure whether it's meant to show what internet connections it can connect to like in later versions, but Windows 7 had simply given me the option to sign in through SSID and password.

After this, we decided to try to find some drivers for ethernet by searching the CPU [get cpu here] and installing drivers for it. This had worked easily and the Windows 7 PC now has ethernet.

After setting up ethernet, we had taken an 8GB DDR3 RAM Stick and replaced the 2x 2GB RAM sticks with this to get higher processing power within the PC. If I'm able to find the mysterious other RAM stick that the ghost of my room has stolen, I can reach the maximum of this PC, 16gb DDR3 ram.

Now that this stuff has been sorted, we attempted all the hard drives and SSDs and found that they were all not functional, though one hard drive has shown up as a 128GiB (meant to be 1TiB) drive but doesn't allow formatting or anything - this may mean that it could be fixed with some software but I am unsure. With the other hard drives my sibling had decided to take them apart and accidentally scratch the disks, the exact reason I had given them a fully faulty hard drive to ruin with their autistic mind.

As of writing this, we have taken the 500GiB harddrive from the other broken PC and put it in, allowing for it to act as a storage drive (after removing the Windows 10 OS from it). By comparing the CPUs, it seems that the broken PC's CPU was two generations ahead (AMD A8-7600 Radeon R7, 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G, 3100Mhz, 4 Cores) compared to the HP PC's cpu (amd a6 5400b apu with radeon tm hd graphics) resulting in upgrading the CPU this Sunday - shopping cart ate the thermal paste.

On Sunday, a 92mm 4-Pin fan had come to allow us to install a rear fan - though - it turns out we needed a 3-Pin fan which we did not account for. This fan has now gone into storage and we have ordered a new 3-Pin fan instead to fit as a rear fan.

Along with this, through use of a display to hdmi cable into a USB Capture card I have recently acquired, I am now able to record and see the HP PC through my main PC (allowing me to have it running stuff like downloads in the background without taking a full monitor to be able to see when it's finished)

In the future, I am hoping to either add a 1TB HDD or CD/DVD Drive to replace the lack of one in the HP PC where one used to be. I have a CD/DVD drive from the old broken pc, though it is too big to fit within the PC as of a support for the HP DVD Drive that has unusual screws (likely proprietary) that I don't have a screwdriver for.

We're also hoping to add a Graphics Card (probably just a really old cheap one) to make the computer more functional. I have found x2 2GB Graphics Cards on gumtree or ebay for £12 though they are a bit far to go for, possibly in the future if they're still listed.

(Ignore the random tissue and diseased carpet)

The PC also runs flash games well - though - when trying to use the classic friv4school (iconic flash game site) it uses the ruffle emulator which makes use of a graphics card that I do not have, causing it to not work, as well as webarchive using ruffle.

If anyone has ways around this I would be more than grateful!