Appliance PCs

[Diggs]

Most techs have an "appliance" PC or two in their tool box. @Mainstay mentioned appliance PCs with the Voyo. I'm a sucker for good older hardware so we've been using the HP t5730 as our PC appliance of choice for quite a few years now. We used to use it with the Win XPe that came with it but obviously not for some time. Lately we've been thickening the t5730s up quite a bit and running 32-bit Win7 or Pro where needed. (They'll accept a drop in Mobile Sempron 3600+, 2 GB of DDR2 and (reluctantly) any old 2.5" IDE PATA hard drive. The t5730s have six external USB ports plus two that are hidden, DVI and VGA, PS2 ports, gigabit Ethernet, full sound, etc. and draw almost no power (~18 watts). We have used the secure USB ports and leave a bootable USB Flash drive in one and a WiFi stick in the other. Plug it in and set it on a bookshelf or stick it in a drawer. They're silent, built tough and pretty much bullet proof but do run hot with the 3600+ Sempron. They run on 12 volts (mobile applications) and resume on power outage. We use a cheap SSD in place of a HDD in ruggedized applications. (And yes they are single-core 32-bit appliances. Not everything requires 64-bit four cores and 16 GB of RAM.)

I just thickened one up and took a few pictures along the way.
A quick pic of the stock Sempron 2100 in socket with the Mobile Sempron 3600+ (circled - sitting on the heatsink for the Radeon graphics chip) waiting to take its place. We do like the 3600+ for the performance and being a mobile chip will throttle itself down to less than the stock Sempron 2100. I also circled the standard 2.5" PATA IDE header. Standard DDR2 laptop RAM (2 GB max) is also used.

A pic showing an HDD being nestled under the hood. No mounting. Caveman engineering. The fit is tight. Just a 2" IDE cable and squish. Insulate the HDD from grounding or use a plastic SSD. We've used an IDE to micro SD adapters instead of HDDs before but very slow.(Didn't realize at the time a HDD would fit.) I circled the two secure USB ports.

Here's the top cover pulled off a fully assembled unit showing the two secure USB ports. Both are bootable so the 1 GB stock Flash drive in the unit becomes almost irrelevant when you boot and run from a 16/32 GB USB Flash drive.

They are used inexpensive units. They sell for about $30 on Ebay. There's plenty of old DDR2 RAM around to pump them up a bit and the Sempron 3600+ is a couple of bucks if added. And, if something happens to one it's really not an issue for us as there isn't much invested.

Sorry for the ramble. That type of cold rainy morning here....

(Pics resolved...)

 

[nlinecomputers]

Can't see the pics.

 

[brandonkick]

Not trying to bash you... but I can't see a lot of a use for this thing. Maybe you can explain what you do use it for?

2GB of ram is probably going to be pretty painful, unless you only do very very light web browsing and you shut off
windows update service completely. I've never done it, but I can't imagine hooking an SSD to that IDE slot will get you
much in terms of performance. I just can't wrap my mind around using a single core mobile CPU, with 2GB of ram in a
win 7 environment doing much other than as I've stated doing light web surfing / email and maybe some basic network
testing? Plug the thing into a router to see if it can connect, just to rule out a bad NIC or Router?

 

[Diggs]

Wow! You must be very young......

We've used them for large-screen store and retail display kiosks, large screen GPS on buses, used a lot of them on production lines for machine interface (notice serial port from old days) and worker production reporting (some coupled to a touch screen), security systems, MagicJack, POS, etc..... Most industrial stuff (software on the floor, not in the server room) is still 32-bit and have very dirty environments. Fanless is preferred.

The SSD? What performance? It's low wattage and plastic so doesn't have to be insulated inside the t5730. Plus they are pretty much shock proof. The fast access time is just a bonus. We don't use them for speed.

Can't even believe you don't have the imagination. A clean Win7 runs great on these. You should get out of the server room and try new things. Broaden your horizons a bit.

 

[BlackLabTechs]

Diggs - I was kind of wondering the same thing. My take on the OP and most likely brandon's is you had this in your toolbox for repairs / troubleshooting on site. Yes these units have many uses in the field, I was wondering how you used as a troubleshooting tool. Your last post cleared it up.

 

[Diggs]

My apologies for the misrepresentation as a tool. I understand the confusion but I followed the thread title. Didn't mean to be snarky.

Still - so tired of things like "2GB of ram is probably going to be pretty painful" from those that never even use 32-bit systems. I here it before the reply.

 

[Pixelated Tech]

These little guys have endless uses. I deploy these for digital signage, mounted to the back of wall mounted HP Pro Displays. They are great for terminal use as well for connections to mainframes using emulation software. These are also fantastic for VMware clients in a VM farm. They have an extremely low power footprint as stated earlier.

*You can more than likely get PFSense on one of these bad boys with a USB NIC add-on. This would be a great router. Possibilities are endless.

 

[brandonkick]

@Diggs....

I'm going to be 30 years old here in a few months, I guess you can say I'm a bit young compared to
most of the industry professionals here.

I can see your points about what this "could" be used for, and honestly I didn't think of those things because
your post led me elsewhere. I'm not saying it's what you inferred, just what I got out of it and hence the reason
I asked. I figured there might be something I just wasn't thinking of.... and well I was right.

The legacy applications you mention, I can see them all running just fine on that hardware.

I've also run 32 bit CPU's.... I've used machines that had windows 3.1 on them. The first machine I owned was a white
box pentium 1 166mhz machine. First machine I can remember using was a windows 3.1 box that had a 486 in it and probably
just a few MB of ram. I was 5 years old at the time I believe.

 

[MDD1963]

My apologies for the misrepresentation as a tool. I understand the confusion but I followed the thread title. Didn't mean to be snarky.

Still - so tired of things like "2GB of ram is probably going to be pretty painful" from those that never even use 32-bit systems. I here it before the reply.

Lord knows, I've seen a few painfully slow 2gb Win7/Sempron desktop systems that had no infections....; very noticeably slow at pretty much everything, even youtube, and basic surfing. I'm sure such a system can do some things, however. I just would not wish such an experience on a Windows 7 user, including 32 bit.

 

[MDD1963]

Lord knows, I've seen a few painfully slow 2gb Win7/Sempron desktop systems that had no infections....; very noticeably slow at pretty much everything, even youtube, and basic surfing. I'm sure such a system can do some things, however. I just would not wish such an experience on a Windows 7 user, including 32 bit.

(Running Linux would be another story!)

 

[glennd]

First machine had a

looxury......

 

[brandonkick]

Oooh - thread drift!

First machine had a 1MHz 8-bit CPU (Motorola 6502) and 2kilobytes of RAM. And was built from a kit.

First Unix machine had 32kilobytes of RAM and a massive 5megabyte hard disc.

First Windows machine was version 1.03 (launched from MS-DOS 2.11, naturally), before it supported overlapping windows.

And I've used OS/2.

Do we have a winner?

Back on topic, every one of those machines did useful work and ran quickly enough for the purpose. A lot of it has to do with using application software that was designed with the hardware in mind, and not expecting miracles. A well set-up machine doesn't need a huge amount of memory or processing power to run a point-of-sale system or a machine tool (or a space launch) - just the right software and none of the bloat.

(Written using Windows 10 on a 1.4GHz i3 with 2GB of RAM, and there's nothing wrong with that.)

So nice job in taking my post out of context....

Diggs basically took a shot at me, at a point in time where he had not clarified any intended usage out of the machine he posted in the first post, by writing me off as some young punk who thinks machines need to be loaded to the max to be worth anything.

I responded, letting him know with the information given, I could only guess about what the intended usages were, and it's a given fact that the machine in his original postings would barely suffice for "office level" type usages today. Anything beyond that, and it would be painfully slow. Again, not an opinion, but a fact. Secondly I was showing him examples of some of the things that I've used to help him get the idea that I'm not some young punk who grew up with the likes of quad core processors and GB's of memory. It wasn't a pissing contest.

I'll agree with you (as I already agreed with Diggs) that those machines are plenty useful in certain scenarios. Just because they are dated hardware wise doesn't mean they are junk. But they do not represent a usable machine for what the average person does with their computer these days. You can check email on them, maybe even bang out a word document or two.... but load up a few tabs in a browser, and have a youtube video playing and that machine chokes just the same way your windows 10 machine would. Your windows 10 machine "MIGHT" struggle along better if it has an SSD in it, but only because now the pagefile is on a SSD and not a slow mechanical drive.

With nothing open but chrome, and four tabs on it in my windows 7 pro home workstation (core i7 930, 6GB ram) I am using 2.88GB ram with 0 % cpu usage. So that's idle, with chrome only. Your machine has 2GB total. Windows can, and will want to load more and more into memory if the memory is available (to a point) and it will make noticeable difference in performance.

At any rate, I don't intend to argue the fact any further. My reply in this case wasn't designed to get a rise out of you and have you come back at me either. Just explaining what the context of my post was.

 

[fencepost]

First machine had a 1MHz 8-bit CPU (Motorola 6502) and 2kilobytes of RAM. And was built from a kit.

I'm really sorry it's taken so long for more modern technology to reach New Zealand.