WIP Old HP Pavilion for XBMC
#1
A couple of years ago I was given an old HP Pavilion T3620-uk and the only reason I took it was the front panel break-out, which I thought would be useful. The owner told me the PC was scrap, otherwise. Much to my surprise, only thing wrong was a loose CPU heatsink and it worked fine.
Specs are - Intel Core2 Duo E6300 @ 1.86GHz, 1GB 3200 DDR2 RAM.
I've added a GF-210 1GB for cheap and am using converters to run the old spare IDE drives I have on the SATA-only motherboard.
I've had several CD-only trials of Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, etc) runing for hours, just to test it and it's been a champ.
I'm wondering what would be the best way to go with this - install Ubuntu and XBMC on that, or simply go straight into
XMCBuntu. I'm assuming that the linux flavours might be a lesser demand on the system than a full-blown W7 (32 or 64) then XBMC on top.
Memory is restricted to a max of 4GB, as two of the slots are dodgy, so only leaves two which can take a max of 2GB each.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/docum...itle_r0002


Any opinions?
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#2
OpenELEC if it's a pure HTPC.
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#3
(2013-12-09, 11:34)CaptainPsycho Wrote: OpenELEC if it's a pure HTPC.

Thanks.
It occurred to me I might take advantage of a freebie and build a NAS/RAID box into it, too. My thinking is that if I keep the number of drives low - say, a total of three 3TB drives,
the guts of the machine will cope with that, and I can splash out on a beefier power supply. Unfortunately, it looks as though HP never supported any faster Intel chips on this board, so I'll have to make the best of this one.

It was originally a media PC anyway (not HD, I suppose) and designed to be quiet, but how quiet surprised me - when it's running you wouldn't know it was on. This impresses me a lot, being used to fairly noisy boxes in the room.
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