Just finished a build for my Father-in-Law, who I had built a rig for as a Christmas gift last year. It was a spare parts build, using an Abit KG7 board, AMD 2000+ chip and a pair of RAID'ed 80gb drives and a GF4 MX420 card. Nothing special, but ... seriously ... we are talking Ebay and email and he's a happy guy.
So he called me two weeks ago after returning from vacation with news that the PC wouldn't start. I immediately guessed PSU, so I had him bring it over and I swapped out the PSU. It fired right up, but still wouldn't POST. I then swapped the video card (2x), RAM (2x), CPU and another PSU !! At this point the only thing left to replace was the board ! Well, there aren't any KG7 RAID boards anywhere, so I searched for a barebones build or maybe even a DIY rig.
It wasn't long before I came across this de-branded rig from Geeks.com:
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...X121-R&cat=SYS
AMD 4200+, 250gb HD, Nv 6150 video, 1GB RAM and DVD-RW, all for only $229 !!! Not a bad deal at all !! I used his Windows XP Home key on the new rig to cover the lack of an OS installed, so that saved me from buying that.
The only downside to the whole deal was the mention that the drivers MAY be hard to find ... holy crap, was I in for a rude surprise !
I spent about 6 HOURS tracking down the stray drivers for this beast, and most of my hassle was in finding the model that it matched on HP's website.
I peeled off a sticker covering a small faceplate, but that did not match the rig. Every HP sticker on this thing was gone, so I opened it up and found it was an Asus OEM board. Off to Asus, but it turns out they don't supply drivers for their OEM boards !
Next search was for the number silkscreened onto the board, an A8M2N-LA, which turned out to be a NodusM3 internal designation via HP for that board. I was then able to find out it was an HP a1660n MCE PC. I narrowed down the five 'unknown devices' in the Device Mangler until I was left with only one, and eventually I got that one too (AMDAway driver ?? Ever hear of THAT ???) Anyhoo, not that he needs it, but I could add an Antec Earthwatts PSU for $40 and an 8800GS for $60, and for $350 shipped he'd have a nice lil rig.
So that's my tale of woe for the week, and my first experience with a de-branded PC. When I told him I was looking at this refurb PC, he said "Ohh, I dont want some used piece of junk" and griped about the 90 day warranty. I then informed him that the DIY rig I would build had no warranty whatsoever except on the individual parts, so he softened his tone and let me do my thing at that point.
Anyone else have any experiences with a de-branded PC ? I'll admit that HP/Compaq make it damn hard to score drivers or identify components, but in the end I was able to make it all work well.
So he called me two weeks ago after returning from vacation with news that the PC wouldn't start. I immediately guessed PSU, so I had him bring it over and I swapped out the PSU. It fired right up, but still wouldn't POST. I then swapped the video card (2x), RAM (2x), CPU and another PSU !! At this point the only thing left to replace was the board ! Well, there aren't any KG7 RAID boards anywhere, so I searched for a barebones build or maybe even a DIY rig.
It wasn't long before I came across this de-branded rig from Geeks.com:
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...X121-R&cat=SYS
AMD 4200+, 250gb HD, Nv 6150 video, 1GB RAM and DVD-RW, all for only $229 !!! Not a bad deal at all !! I used his Windows XP Home key on the new rig to cover the lack of an OS installed, so that saved me from buying that.
The only downside to the whole deal was the mention that the drivers MAY be hard to find ... holy crap, was I in for a rude surprise !
I spent about 6 HOURS tracking down the stray drivers for this beast, and most of my hassle was in finding the model that it matched on HP's website.
I peeled off a sticker covering a small faceplate, but that did not match the rig. Every HP sticker on this thing was gone, so I opened it up and found it was an Asus OEM board. Off to Asus, but it turns out they don't supply drivers for their OEM boards !
Next search was for the number silkscreened onto the board, an A8M2N-LA, which turned out to be a NodusM3 internal designation via HP for that board. I was then able to find out it was an HP a1660n MCE PC. I narrowed down the five 'unknown devices' in the Device Mangler until I was left with only one, and eventually I got that one too (AMDAway driver ?? Ever hear of THAT ???) Anyhoo, not that he needs it, but I could add an Antec Earthwatts PSU for $40 and an 8800GS for $60, and for $350 shipped he'd have a nice lil rig.
So that's my tale of woe for the week, and my first experience with a de-branded PC. When I told him I was looking at this refurb PC, he said "Ohh, I dont want some used piece of junk" and griped about the 90 day warranty. I then informed him that the DIY rig I would build had no warranty whatsoever except on the individual parts, so he softened his tone and let me do my thing at that point.
Anyone else have any experiences with a de-branded PC ? I'll admit that HP/Compaq make it damn hard to score drivers or identify components, but in the end I was able to make it all work well.
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