I made a few modifications to this primo HP Envy computer:
Tested the ram RAM: three passes of MemTest86+ with no errors.
I am pretty impressed with the build quality of this PC. Still can’t believe someone dropped it off at Goodwill…
My old friend from grade school days is a thrift store superstar. He finds all kinds of treasures that you would never imagine at Goodwill and other second-hand shops. Over the past year or so, sometimes I will take him and another old friend, Jeff, on what we call “Shopping Safaris” where we hit all the Goodwill stores in the Tri-City area.
Today was such a day. We started off with a great breakfast at Denny’s including plenty of caffeine and protein. Next stop was the Goodwill in Richland. I always head to the electronics section first, so I did. I saw what looked like a computer monitor and went in to check it out. Turns out it was an HP Envy 20 All-In-One computer with a price tag of only $30. Plugged it into the power supply and hit the power button. Wouldn’t boot because likely it had no operating system or even hard disk. But the screen looked great and everything else looked to be in good shape as well. So I bought it, of course! Also on the Safari I picked up some nice art including a couple of paintings, some solid brass sailboat sculptures, and other decor.
After returning home from the Safari, I tore into the HP and installed an mSATA SSD, a straight old 2.5 inch SSD, and some extra RAM I had laying around. The hard drive caddy was missing, so I ordered one of those on eBay for about seven dollars. But the SSD is light enough to be held in place by the connector alone, so I just buttoned it all back up. Linux was already on the mSATA from a previous notebook SSD upgrade I did a few days ago. To my pleasant surprise, it all booted up and works just fine. Even the touch screen driver modules seem to have been automatically detected and loaded by Ubuntu. I am writing this post on the computer right now, in fact.
Also ordered a Core i5 CPU upgrade on eBay, since it only has a Core i3. I may also order 2x8GB SODIMMs to boost the RAM. Right now it “only” has 8GB, which is plenty, but I like to max RAM out whenever possible. Searching for complete HP Envy 20 computers on eBay, they seem to be running anywhere from $250 to $300. So today was some really great Goodwill hunting!!
I will never buy another Seagate hard drive again. In the past few months, I have had to replace several of them in my home computer systems. And these weren’t grizzled veteran drives with years of use under their belt. No, these were relatively new, yet suddenly developed unrecoverable sector errors and other SMART detected problems.
In the past twenty years I have been building various systems ranging from simple home user desktops to multi-disk multi-CPU severs, Seagate (at least their “desktop” line of drives) ranks up their with the IBM DeskStar (aka DeathStar) and Western Digital Caviar “Green” drives in terms of shittiness. These drives share a cold place in the Hall of Shame.
Time was a Seagate SCSI drive was a “gotta have” piece of equipment for building a good computer. I think it started going downhill when they bought out Maxtor, and starting slapping the Seagate label on those drives.
A couple years ago I came across a report by BackBlaze or some other major cloud storage provider. The paper presents their statistical findings of various brands of hard drives and failure rates. Based on their experience with tens of thousands of hard drives, the report indicated that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) were the most reliable.
Since then, I have been putting HGST “Ultrastar” SATA and SAS drives in my servers, and have been really pleased. Even “refurbished” drives with several years of runtime have been more reliable for me than Seagate drives.
Recently, Western Digital acquired HGST. Last year, they announced they will drop the HGST branding and incorporate those products under the WD product line. I truly hope they maintain the same (or better) level of quality. I guess time will tell. In the meanwhile, I’m stocking up on extra HGST Ultrastar drives where I can from eBay and other vendors.
My Macbook Air would not take the OS X 10.14.4 update today. Tried several times, always failed. Ran the built-in Mac diagnostics and it said there may be a problem with a memory module. Booted MemText86+ from an external CD drive and it confirmed there were problems. As you may know, the memory on the Macbook Air is soldered onto the logic board (motherboard) and is virtually impossible to replace on its own.
Chatting with Apple support, they suggested I contact a local service dealer. So I did. Called Alpha Computers and they told me that my Macbook Air was just old enough that they would not be able to get replacement parts from Apple.
So now I’m stuck with what was once a fairly spendy laptop that I cannot repair. For satisfaction’s sake, I clamped it in the huge vise on my garage workbench, then smashed it up with the sledge end of my eight pound splitting maul. Tossed it in the trash like so much garbage. I may take the aluminum shell and recycle it.
At this point, I am not sure I will ever buy another Macintosh. Literally the only laptop I’ve ever owned that actually had memory fail on it. The irony of it: all the other laptops I have owned with replaceable RAM modules, and none of them have failed. Buy a Mac with non-replaceable modules and they fail. Probably keep using Ubuntu on Thinkpad or Toughbook hardware until that is no longer an option.