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So about five years ago I bought an HP desktop running Windows 7, a refurbished model from Tiger Direct. Now, the power supply has quit. Not sure at the moment if the part can even be found but the mobile repair service that was out here yesterday mentioned that I could find the same model PC on Amazon and just swap out the hard drives and carry on like before.

Turns out that's true, $105 with free shipping on Amazon, lets me save my data and avoid buying a new desktop I really can't afford at the moment.

So my question is, if I got a new refurbished model and swapped out the hard drive, would I be looking at any issue with keycodes?  Or updates?  It took about 12 hours to install updates the last time.

Or is it literally plug and play and carry on?  It also now occurs that I could use the $105 PC as a source for the power supply that spit the bit. I'm sure that would truly be plug and play.

As always thanks in advance.

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Seriously dude, you need to cultivate a network of family-friend geeks, the type who sneer at people who do it for a living, and fairly so. Find one and take him/her to a local Micro-Center. It's like taking a kid to a circus!

There are definitely people here who know more about this than I do, but I'm thinking that if all your guts and peripherals are the same, it should be more or less a seamless P&P.

My daughter's current BF is really, really facile with this stuff, swapping parts, building from scratch, resurrecting Werewolf into Frankenstein, etc. and I've watched him work. He makes it look easy, but I'm not sure if it really is.

The closest personal experience I have had is with two Dell XPSs bought at the same time, one for me, one for my daughter. She grew out of a desktop, so we've switched all kinds of parts back and forth between the two along the way (always with somebody smart in the room, though). It works.

I think the main thing you want to try to do with the refurbished model is make sure that the guts are the same, same BIOS, same processor, same video card, same everything, maybe even same RAM. Because your OS is on your hard drive, the first time you start it up, it's going to go looking for the same thing it's always looked for. P&P is pretty much the norm these days, but there's always little surprises, you might have to give it permission on some things, but that's about it.

 

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Swapping your hard drive into a new mainframe might work fine. As Scott says, you might need a few drivers changed but it might be easy since it's the same model. But the main problem with this is that it will only work for 30 days or whatever time limit Microsoft put into the Windows 7 activation program. Your Windows 7 operating system will no longer be valid. You won't be able to do any updates and there's a chance that after a certain number of re-boots, it won't boot into Windows 7 any more.

I would try to find a new power supply on eBay and swap that out. It's an easy swap - a few screws and a few easy to swap electrical connectors. Take pictures before you start and maybe have someone take a video as you remove the old one. They sometimes route cables in weird ways.

The other option - and this all depends on what you want to use this machine for... Is buy that $105 machine, get it up & running with Ubuntu (Linux - free) and then take your old hard drive and mount it in an external USB hard drive case and use it as an external drive. I use Ubuntu on all of my machines in my house except one that my daughter uses for Microsoft Office presentations. Which she really doesn't even need since Ubuntu comes with Libra Office which will open and allow you to edit all .doc, .ppt & .xls files.

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1 hour ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

Swapping your hard drive into a new mainframe might work fine. As Scott says, you might need a few drivers changed but it might be easy since it's the same model. But the main problem with this is that it will only work for 30 days or whatever time limit Microsoft put into the Windows 7 activation program. Your Windows 7 operating system will no longer be valid. You won't be able to do any updates and there's a chance that after a certain number of re-boots, it won't boot into Windows 7 any more.

Wouldn't the Windows 7 operating system be valid with the keycode that comes with the new machine? I don't understand why this would be a 30 day fix only.

I am seriously thinking about vulturing the power supply instead of messing with the hard drive.  And totally committed to backing up everything on it once I have access to it again. I'd probably even use the mobile service guys for that. Felt bad they were so nice but came out from Tampa - probably 45 minute drive - and left with no fee collected. They also gave advice to my wife about her laptop that was refreshingly non-repair oriented.

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The Windows activation process generates a key that is a combination of several key components in your machine. I forget how many of them it uses but this key locks your Windows 7 installation to that machine. When you take your hard drive and put it into another machine, it reads the hardware and compares it to this activation key and if there is too much difference, your Windows 7 installation becomes invalid. They did it so that you could swap out a peripheral or two, but multiple swaps (or a motherboard swap) will likely invalidate the installation.

I don't know if you could re-install it onto your old hard drive in the new machine, but if you do, you may lose some of your old data.

A safer bet is to mount your old drive to a working PC and get what files are there backed up. If you use another Windows machine, you won't be able to access most systems files, but your documents should be accessible. A Ubuntu (Linux) machine with your drive mounted externally should be fully accessible.

For your wife's laptop, if she's using it mainly to access the Internet, Ubuntu is definitely the way to go. It makes almost all laptops much faster.

Just an FYI - you can make her laptop or any machine "dual boot" so that when you turn it on, it will ask you if you want to boot into Windows or Ubuntu. You'll probably find yourself booting into Ubuntu all the time. :)

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This is way more complicated than I anticipated. I think vulturing the power supply from a new PC or finding it on eBay is the way to go.

As far as the laptop goes, her issues are a dying battery and a terrible over-heating problem. Rather than telling her of some options that would cost her money, he told her its a well-known design-flaw of the machine that it overheats so easily and she should just buy a new one.

Thanks for your advice Kevin.

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Kevin, when did Microsoft implement that security measure in consumer operating systems? I know they had them in commercial/server releases, but through Windows XP I never had any issues switching hard drives to other towers, and they ran far longer than 30 days. 

This is a new one on me. 

Edited by Scott Dolan
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If it were me, I'd just replace the power supply. No need to get a new refurb PC just to extract the power supply from it; assuming the PS is a standard size, you should be able to get one for significantly less than $105. It doesn't have to be the exact same model power supply as long as the replacement outputs at least the same power as the old unit.

In my experience, most lower-priced HP desktops come with a factory power supply that just puts out enough power to run the machine as-is, but if you start adding expansion cards or other peripherals that suck up a decent amount of power, the stock PS quickly becomes insufficient and you have to swap it out with a higher-powered unit. So you should be able to easily find a new replacement that will probably more than meet your power requirements. Micro Center has a crapload of them:

http://www.microcenter.com/category/4294966654/power-supplies

and I'm sure other e-tailers like Fry's or Newegg have a similar selection. 

Edited by Dave Garrett
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9 hours ago, Dave Garrett said:

If it were me, I'd just replace the power supply. No need to get a new refurb PC just to extract the power supply from it; assuming the PS is a standard size, you should be able to get one for significantly less than $105. It doesn't have to be the exact same model power supply as long as the replacement outputs at least the same power as the old unit.

Found the exact same power supply on Amazon yesterday for less than $35, though expedited shipping almost doubled the price. I've got a buddy who is lending me his thingamabob that dispels static electricity, (if he wasn't heading out of town I'd ask him to do the swapping as he's done it before) and my lovely wife has volunteered to do the deed.

I'm optimistic I'll be up and running again by mid-week. 

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Well the hits keep on coming. The power supply arrived, Sue took on the task of installation and ... same infuriating beeping/blinking red light. So bad power supply received or something else?  :excited:

At this point I don't care. I am moving on to harvesting the hard drive for conversion to external HD, that will at least allow me to access the data from the work PC that lives right next to the f*cked up home PC.

I am going to determine if the work PC can take on both roles but I don't think there's a burn drive installed which defeats the major purpose of transferring vinyl to CDR.  Could decide to just put them all on thumb drives in the future but I don't really like that option at the moment. Not even sure there's a line in jack at the moment anyway.

Leaves me purchasing the $105 refurbished identical Windows 7 machine which at least has a burning drive and an audio line in, or finding something reasonably priced and more up-to-date. But if burn drives are not considered "hip" anymore, then I guess my choice is clear.

:shrug[1]:

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Sometimes, the bios battery on the motherboard dies and causes those blinking lights. If there's a watch battery on your motherboard, try replacing it.

Also, sometimes a brown out can cause a protection circuit to kick in. Try holding down the power button for a minute or two before letting it go. It might re-set the protection circuit.

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2 hours ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

Sometimes, the bios battery on the motherboard dies and causes those blinking lights. If there's a watch battery on your motherboard, try replacing it.

Also, sometimes a brown out can cause a protection circuit to kick in. Try holding down the power button for a minute or two before letting it go. It might re-set the protection circuit.

Doesn't help. but here's something interesting - I assumed part was right because the three connectors were all the same. But just actually discovered they sent HP 503376-001 instead of HP 503375-001.

Would that make all the difference?

And do I try ordering the part again and hope it fixes the damn thing this time?

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1 hour ago, Daniel A said:

A very quick web search seems to indicate that the two part numbers are interchangeable.

I just talked to the mobile service and he said it shouldn't make a difference either. He figures now that the motherboard is fried and that's the problem.

I confirmed that work PC has no line in so its not going to handle LP transfers.  I am thinking I will go with the refurbished model and convert the hard drive to external.

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2 hours ago, Dan Gould said:

Doesn't help.

There is no battery on the motherboard? That's weird. Most desktop motherboards do.

Sometimes a RAM stick dies and causes blinking lights, but most machines will start to boot anyway. Does the machine start to boot at all or does it refuse to turn on completely? Try pulling the RAM and re-inserting it. If there are multiple sticks, try swapping their locations.

BTW, there's usually a sequence to that blinking light that indicates what's at fault. Did you look up the service manual for the machine to see if they talk about the blinking light sequence?

If it does start to turn on before the light starts to blink, try turning it on and keep pressing F2 on the keyboard to try and get it into the set up screen. There should be a way to run tests from there.

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  • 1 month later...

Apologies if I'm hijacking a thread...the title seems generic enough and my comment is almost on topic.

I’ve seen multiple independently-sourced articles in the past two days about a major security flaw in the Intel x86 architecture. Everyone is keeping quiet until kernel patches are available. Unfortunately, the kernel patches could impose a 30-35% performance penalty, especially with older OS systems.   

Malicious code utilizing a new method of side-channel analysis and running locally on a normally operating platform has the potential to allow the inference of data values from memory. This issue is not specific to Intel products and takes advantage of techniques commonly used in many modern processor architectures.   Side-channel Analysis is generally used to gain information about cryptosystems on the platform. This information can be used to gather a range of potentially sensitive data such as passwords and encryption keys. 

Expect patches and upgrades to roll out in a week or so.

 

 

 

Edited by Coda
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The word is out.  Technology companies are scrambling to assess how vulnerable their systems are to these flaws.   Risk on appliances could be very low but a consensus is emerging that virtual applications - that is anything that runs on a shared 'VM' server environment could be very vulnerable.  Products cannot guarantee that the physical server isn’t being shared with potentially harmful executables.   We are in a waiting phase for the microcode, then BIOS, then OS updates required to address this threat.  

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  • 2 months later...

There’s a bad phishing email hitting some companies today in the form of a fake DHL shipment notification. The email contains 2 .exe files disguised as pdf files which launch a keylogger when run or even previewing in Outlook.  If you get one of these, do not open the links.

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On ‎3‎/‎5‎/‎2018 at 0:43 PM, Coda said:

There’s a bad phishing email hitting some companies today in the form of a fake DHL shipment notification. The email contains 2 .exe files disguised as pdf files which launch a keylogger when run or even previewing in Outlook.  If you get one of these, do not open the links.

 

 

 

Good advice!  Never open any pdf that looks even the tiniest bit fishy (or especially phishy).  Word files too, Excel probably too.

I don't click on any URL link that I haven't inspected the actual URL that's in (under) the hyperlink.  Perfectly legit-looking URL links can sure go god only knows where.  Example:

http://bunnies-and-sunshine.blogspot.com/

Also, look at the actual email address behind what looks like the email address in your mail client (even if web-based).  My wife's constantly asking me about rogue Paypal transactions that we get emails about on our shared home email address -- but when you really look, they're coming from email addresses in Asia, or god knows where.

If it doesn't look totally legit, and if it isn't actually coming from who it says it's coming from -- don't click, and sure as hell don't open any attachments.

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