New/old toy, dream find with nightmare makers!

digitalwanderer

wandering
Legend
Been wanting an old iPod since I got my car 7 years ago, it's made to integrate it seemless into the entertainment system and be controlled by my steering wheel. My mom had one for years, but after spending a few hours moving furniture around her house yesterday I found it in her garage on her scrap electronics pile and asked her about it. She said it was broke and I could have it. :D

HPiPod.jpg

Question, why does an iPod have an HP tag on it? It's like two of my most hated hardware companies in one!

It came with a little JBL docking/speaker station. I wasted no time and popped it open yesterday, pulled the HDD, and yanked the bubbly battery. New battery should be in today, I think I'll be asking for help as I know nothing of iPods and my first computer was an HP. A pentium 60Mhz on a socket 4 mobo, GODS I hated that thing and learned a ton from it. Unfortunately it was mostly, "and this is why you should build your own computer and pick your own components", type stuff, but it's proved useful over time.

I've avoided HP like the plague since then, absolutely hate everything about 'em. Apple I just hate their closed ecosystem and over-priced hardware so it's no where near as intense. More of a different strokes for different folks who can afford that kind of stuff. ;)
 
I dislike HP as well but have fond memories of Compaq, which was later bought by them. For most of my teenage years I had Compaq 486 DX2 @ 66Mhz my father bought from the company he worked for when they replaced their PCs. The thing was quite beafy for the time, as it had 32Mb of RAM while most PCs at the time I got this one barely had 64 and they were Pentium II`s!!! The graphics card was an Oak Technologies TSENG Labs 4000 with 4MB of VRAM and the while only displaying 256 colours it ran Windows XP in 1280x1024. As long as a game didn't use Direct 3D it would run Direct X games mostly fine such as Age of Empires, Diablo, etc... Eventually I added a CD-ROM drive to it and played Diablo II which ran reasonably well until you had the screen fully packed with mobs, when it would slow down to a crawl. It just wouldn't play cinematics as it needed 16 bit color minimum for that. But was I amazed that it ran it at all! I finished the first two acts on it before finally got an up to date PC in the form of a Pentium III @ 1Ghz with 64MB RAM and a Riva TNT 2 M64. For the price I paid, and especially with just the Riva, it didn't feel like the huge upgrade I was expecting to be honest. It improved a year later when I upgraded the RAM to 320MB and to a GeForce Ti4200. But still, that Compaq kept on my mind as "the little boy who could".
 
Well I can't hate the HP iPod, I already have it working and I saved all my mom's tunes too. I don't think I'm going to keep it, she's had it by her bed to listen to for as long as I can remember and I heard the delight in her voice when I told her I fixed it. Taking it by either tomorrow or Friday, also got a TV arm I have to install for her. <sigh>

At least I'll learn how to install TV arms! :D
 
I gave it back to my Mom yesterday and she was absolutely delighted, I made the right choice. :)

EDITED BITS: Oh, and the TV arm rocks and was easy/peasy. Just a matter of getting cables long enough to reach and extend. :)
 
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