The Lemon Fool

Today I pulled out an old Hewlett Packard Pavilion M9373 (~2007 Windows Vista) intending to clean out the dust/fluff and bring it back into use for the kids to play old computer games.

My intention was to take out its well-used hard drive which might be near the end of its life and replace with a new hard drive, installing a fresh or recent version of Windows.

Upon opening the case to clean it up I found what appears to be an identical pair of 500GB hard drives, both with their own set of power and communication cables. However, getting them out looks like a long job because they're buried deep under other components, cables etc.

Asking the computer to tell me what's inside confirms it has two HDD
HP (C) used 336GB, free 117GB
HP2 (E) used 2.58GB, free 463GB

How much of a job will it be to persuade the computer to move over to using the lightly-used HP2 (E) HDD, installing a fresh or more recent version of windows in the process?

Thanks,
BT

First, does the computer hardware support a better version of Windows? You might find there are no drivers for network cards etc. In any case, you can not upgrade for free from vista to Windows 10, so there is probably little point. It's not worth buying a licence for such an old pc.

If you want a supported (ie security patches available) operating system then the only option is Linux. Obviously you'd have to wipe and reformat over of the disk drives. If I was doing this, I might buy a small solid state drive.

So, you didn't find 100 Bitcoin then ...

Midsmartin wrote:First, does the computer hardware support a better version of Windows? You might find there are no drivers for network cards etc. In any case, you can not upgrade for free from vista to Windows 10, so there is probably little point. It's not worth buying a licence for such an old pc.

If you want a supported (ie security patches available) operating system then the only option is Linux. Obviously you'd have to wipe and reformat over of the disk drives. If I was doing this, I might buy a small solid state drive.

It doesn't matter if the computer stays with Vista.

AleisterCrowley wrote:So, you didn't find 100 Bitcoin then ...

Sadly, no.

Arguably it'll be a bit faster if you have the os on one drive and data on the other. So they share the load a bit.

But if you can delete the junk, and get all the data on the same drive as the OS, you are then free to clone it to the other drive using software such as Acronis, or there are some free options.

Or, empty one of the drives and do a clean install of Vista on it.

Is there a factory restore partition?
Actually even if there is wipe it all and put on a better OS
And I say that as someone who has a Vista machine (2006 Vaio with a busted screen board) in daily service
- I need it's hardware to talk to a Sony Handycam and apparently the drivers aren't there if I wanted to upgrade the OS
- so it sits there, hypothecated from the rest of the network by as much security as I'm prepared to deal with at home - doing my torrent work


-sd

servodude wrote:Is there a factory restore partition?
Actually even if there is wipe it all and put on a better OS
And I say that as someone who has a Vista machine (2006 Vaio with a busted screen board) in daily service
- I need it's hardware to talk to a Sony Handycam and apparently the drivers aren't there if I wanted to upgrade the OS
- so it sits there, hypothecated from the rest of the network by as much security as I'm prepared to deal with at home - doing my torrent work


-sd

Yesterday evening I also noticed that it thinks it has a third drive (D) in addition to HP(C) and HP2(E). D has what is labelled as a factory image; 10GB used, 2GB free.

BT63 wrote:

servodude wrote:Is there a factory restore partition?
Actually even if there is wipe it all and put on a better OS
And I say that as someone who has a Vista machine (2006 Vaio with a busted screen board) in daily service
- I need it's hardware to talk to a Sony Handycam and apparently the drivers aren't there if I wanted to upgrade the OS
- so it sits there, hypothecated from the rest of the network by as much security as I'm prepared to deal with at home - doing my torrent work


-sd

Yesterday evening I also noticed that it thinks it has a third drive (D) in addition to HP(C) and HP2(E). D has what is labelled as a factory image; 10GB used, 2GB free.

Yes... if you have that you can use the factory reset function to restore to where it was in 2007
- but without a very good idea of whether it can be brought up to date afterwards

I'd be very tempted to try Linux; or a fresh Win 10 install (and worry about licensing later if it becomes an issue)
- I did that with a laptop my daughter had for school (after it was replaced... it was factory restored to an unusable state; then spent a couple of subsequent months running lubuntu and now is a pretty nifty and portable win10 machine - with no complaint yet)


-sd