May 30th, 2025

Dead Power Supplies and Living Pentiums.

Where's my 10 GHz, Intel?

Two More Towers.

Some time ago I was given two more unwanted old towers. A Dell Optiplex 210L and a HP Pavilion p6715f. Both do function now, but they needed some work. This blog post is about them.

The Optiplex.

The Optiplex was in a shed, outside, getting coated in El Paso Dust, even though it was in a plastic bag. I cleaned it up as best as I could in my impatience to power it on. The machine did function, and works fine, with the exception of the optical drive, which had been damaged, presumably by the dust.

The Optiplex.

Upon opening the machine, I found that the RAM appears to have been upgraded from 1GB to 3GB, giving it the ability to do more than it originally could. Unfortunately, I noticed one spot where Dell had cheaped out on this machine. Despite it having Intel-grated graphics, this machine has no spot for a easy GPU upgrade. It has a single PCIe 1x slot and three PCI slots. Almost all GPUs use a 16x slot.

Inside the Optiplex.

Notice the small, tiny PCIe 1x slot.

Inside the machine was also a massive fan and a heatsink to keep the Prescott CPU cold. These Pentium 4’s were known for their heat, and this machine is no exception with its blazing fast 3.00 GHz clock speed. Good thing Pentium 4 CPUs never hit 10 GHz as Intel promised.

Even though the Pentium 4 VAIO I have with a older Northwood CPU is faster, specifically on the graphics side, this Dell has advantages in modern usability despite the hobble of a 1x PCIe slot. The Pentium 4 in this Dell supports not only hyperthreading (disabled by default for some odd reason), but it also supports the use of 64-bit software.

I did put Windows XP on a SSD I installed in the machine, though Linux seemed to be the better choice. Although my other Pentium 4 machine runs Linux too, anything that uses the GPU runs badly on it thanks to NVIDIA not having a open source driver. This Dell, thanks to its use of the bad Intel-grated graphics, can run Linux perfectly, as Intel-grated graphics have open source drivers. I was able to browse the web on it with Firefox and uBlock Origin on it, and was even able to play back YouTube at 480p, with the caveat of not being able to full-screen the video due to that being too much for the computer.

Linux Mint 22 with XFCE on it. I did change the theme.

YouTube in Firefox at 480p.

The Pavilion.

The Pavilion.

The Pavilion was less successful. It had been in a attic for years, I presume, and when I got the machine it was obvious someone had been in there before me. It was missing 1GB out of the 5GB HP promised, and it was also missing the 1.5TB HDD the sticker on the side promised. I threw in a disk and tried turning it on. Nothing. I opened the machine. Everything looked fine. But upon more inspection, the power supply was making a clicking noise. It was dead. I took the power supply out of the Yard Sale PC as it fit the requirements, and the machine turned on.

Sticker on the side.

Inside the Pavilion.

Yes, that's right, it has a full size PCIe 16x slot!

Missing expansion slot covers.

However, I have the feeling the BIOS is messed up. Despite me trying to fix it by updating the BIOS, the machine did not display a HP splash screen, and it also had no idea what its model number or serial number was. I suppose the PSU took that out along the way of it dying. Linux, and HWInfo identify the machine as a PPPPP-CCC-MMMMMMMM.

The startup screen the BIOS displays. Notice the lack of any HP branding.

As a unfortunate side effect, this also means that the recovery discs simply refuse to function. I was able to reinstall plain Windows 7 to get the machine functioning. I did install Linux Mint, since I don’t have to activate it and it will run fine on this hardware. The machine has a Core i3-550 dual core with hyperthreading, and runs fairly well. It needs 8GB of RAM and a SSD at some point for making it more usable, but even then you can still use the PC just fine.

Linux Mint on the Pavilion. I noticed my exposure was too low too late.

Chickens and other stuff.

The chickens are all fine, though the weather hovers around the 90F mark just about every day. It’s cloudy as I write this, though it does not seem to be any colder.

Josephine eating plants.