Newest toy...

I can remember paying several grand for an old Zenith PC...

My newest toy is an eBay item, a HP T5720 Thin Client for $17. http://www.ebay.com/itm/281080741827?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

Just the basic machine without flash ROM or RAM chip. Well I had an old memory chip lying in a drawer, so I threw in a 1gb RAM module. I had an old laptop a/c power supply (12V) lying around, so I plugged it in. And I had an old 8gb USB drive sitting in a drawer as well to replace the flash ROM. I also have an old keyboard, mouse, and monitor not in use...so really I have everything I needed.

Not much of a speed demon, I agree...still it makes into a very cheap and inexpensive desktop machine.

I was thinking how much more powerful this is over the old Z-150 I originally purchased back in the '80s....





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Rich,
are the thinstate flash utils still available for this model?

I've been watching these machines on ebay for quite some time, but no cheap ones at 1GHz. Just the really old 5000 model, which has a nasty (silver) finish. But worse, I wasn't able to locate the support pages on HP site.

Edited by dusty_dex 2013-04-23 12:01 AM

Slow, perhaps, but very grabbing, visual-wise. A face for radio

Jake

I'm not sure what you mean by "tools." HP has all the image files for XPE on their support site however...and I was able to install IE8 on the thing and surf with it without problem.

Not a speed demon by any stretch...still plenty fast enough for non-memory intensive stuff...and I've been running off a USB flash drive which is slow anyways.

I think today I'll install an old IDE drive in the thing. That should speed things up significantly.

Anyways, we are talking a 1ghz desktop for $17...that is hard to beat.

HP Thinstate flashing tool - update/add features, service packs/patches to XP Embedded, boot into USB memory stick and reflash.

I never would have expected Win8 to boot on that thing.

Edited by dusty_dex 2013-04-23 1:09 PM

IE8...not Win8

I thought Thinstate was just an image capture tool used to capture an existing thin client image and deploy it on other thin clients, either remotely or via a USB stick.

Anyways, I haven't had any trouble adding anything because I'm not using XPE, I installed the full version of XP. But it is really slow loading off the USB stick, so I'm gonna install a normal IDE hard drive on it today...

Or I could just turn it into a DOS machine...let's see if I still have my old Wordstar and Lotus 123 floppies lying around here somewhere...oops, just realized I don't have a a 5 1/4" 360K floppy drive any more....

I bet I could flash a Windows CE image on it however....

Oh IE8, boy do I feel a dumb-ass right now.

Why not use high-speed CF card or SSD? The enhanced write filter (EWF) apparently works on standard XP. You could pick up a 'trailing-edge' SSD (1-2yr old tech) for a bargain price.



Edited by dusty_dex 2013-04-23 3:22 PM

All of my CF cards are pretty small...1gb or less, I have one 4gb but it is slow. I could use an SD card I guess, but I don't know how fast they are...I have a couple of IDE to CF adapters, but I have a IDE to SATA adapter and several small laptop SATA drives being unused...so I was thinking of using it since it wouldn't incur any more cost...

But I've been thinking of buying a SSD just because of its low heat characteristics and low power demand...





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Well if you already have spares, there's little point spending money for less storage space. Which is pretty much what you're sacrificing when going down the SSD/super fast CF route.

I use a 300x CF card on one machine at that's quite impressive. It's only 16GB though, I couldn't quite stretch the funds for a 32GB. Not really sure about going bigger than that because I don't believe XP supports X-FAT volumes.

Edited by dusty_dex 2013-04-23 6:34 PM

Just picked up one of these http://www.pcsuperstore.com/products/10323218-Chip_PC-CPN02443.html

There's nothing on HPCF & not much about it elsewhere, barring retail outlets and the official website.

3x USB with options to enable HDD, CD & Floppy
1xVGA
1xDVI
Mic/Line
1x 9-pin serial port
Reset & Standby
Secure card slot

CE6 Pro, afaik it's cpu is Mips (or a derivative) there's not much to report on the innards, and the internal storage is non-removable flash chip.

I'd like to use it as a low-powered and silent (audio only) media player, playing files from external USB device. If I could get the httpd web server installed onto it, I could host the media files through that.

What I also need to do is get a list of the hardware device info that is reported to the OS, so that I can use CE6 Platform Builder to add OS components (generally muck about)
Any ideas, thoughts, comments?



Edited by dusty_dex 2013-04-25 11:36 PM

Please tell me you didn't pay $399 for it. Your's must be updated as I see that one has CE.NET on it. Copy the MFCCE30.DLL and OLECE30.DLL along with a CE3 MIPS program onto an SD card and see if the program will run...that should tell you if it is MIPS or not if you can't get into the system to look around...

Addendum: I guess it is MIPS compatible: It uses the AMD Au1550 500 MHz processor. More info here: http://www.ifitsys.com/download/au1550.pdf

No I paid 20GBP excluding delivery, off eBay. It's worked out cheaper than a Raspberry Pi, which I intended to use for media playback, but it's not very stable when used with powered USB hubs. (power from hub is interfering with normal micro-usb power)

Yes thanks for the link, I now know it is Mips , it's a system on chip (SOC) The instruction set is Mips 32 (no hardware floating point) R3000, and mem-controller is R4000.
AMD acquired it from Alchemy, then subsequently sold it off to another company, which is now owned by Broadcom.

CE6 R2 original models were CE4.2 as stated in that link. That's the only version made available for CE Platform builder, still available from microsoft embedded site.

I've also got to find out what the F2 key does, according to the user manual there's another operational mode. Perhaps it disables the network client mode. (full CE6 desktop?)

Also does hi-definition 1920x1200, so I can use DVI-HDMI adapter for TV use. Which is very handy.

=== update ===
I'd like to find out more about the card slot, PKI security thing. I've never had experience with these cards, and wondered if it's the same one as found on the J720.

Having taken it apart, this connector is pcb edge type. not pins. Do you know much about these?

Addendum:
It isn't PKI, that's an optional component. So I'm guessing it's a compact version of the PCI bus. I'll post an image of the internals, shortly.


Edited by dusty_dex 2013-04-26 4:49 PM

Photos of the Chip PC 6500NG PCB. There are 50 pins on each side of the pcb. It also has some SMD resistors on the underside for CONFIG.

Edited by dusty_dex 2013-04-26 6:26 PM








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Certainly small enough...and I think with that edge connector we know how they flashed the OS onto the thing originally....

I've been running Puppy Linux and SDL on mine today just for the heck of it. Works okay too. I'm not a Linux expert, or fan really, but you have to admit it sure is easy to deploy on these things, or run off a USB stick.

What I wish I still had was my AMD 50x15. Back when I had it I never thought about trying to copy the proprietory BIOS flash off the BIOS chip. I wish I had. Since this HP T5720 I have has a Geode GX processor as its heart, I bet if I had the BIOS off the 50X15, then I could run the CE5 OS that came with the AMD on this HP, but instead of 366mHz, it would be 1gHz in speed.

Anyways, it would be fun to do just the the heck of it.

These thin clients are more than powerful enough for most basic needs, certainly more powerful than my old Pentium machines I used to rely upon to meet my needs. And they are small and quiet.

If I were one of those guys who visits those sites that you shouldn't visit, then a thin client would be the way to go since it is virtually invulnerable to nasty things like viruses and trojan horses, and other malware. And if I were a criminal, it would be even better, because even if the FBI came in and confiscated my hardware, they wouldn't find anything on it at all since it is all RAM based and doesn't keep any incriminating evidence.

Before I bought this Mips device, I was torn between that and a linux based HP thin client machine (pretty much looks the same as yours which is no big surprise ). The reason I didn't go for it was that I'm already running a linux distro on the Raspberry Pi, plus my main PC has Ubuntu Studio on it.
So after trying several dud solutions (7" Android Tablet & a smartphone / JournE Touch / Newton MP2000), I've just recently bought another J720 in mint condition.

Definitely been bitten by the CE bug again, and thought it would be nice to have a CE based thin client too.

OK, I hadn't known the Geode was also SOC. I just thought it was standard pc low-power cpu and everything else was standard PC chipsets and controllers bolted on.
I totally agree that most tasks can be achieved with sub 1GHz machines, unfortunately the current disease is bloated software and enormous storage needs. Not very practical trying to shift terabytes with a 500MHz cpu. I used to do that, but it gets irritating after a while.

How do you go about copying a bios, is there a tool available?
I did wonder if the J720 has some unknown booting mechanism, because it would be real nice to bypass ROM and boot from CF card. If you cold boot the 720 it flashes up some short text or checksum before the splash screen comes up. (not the warning about existing data)

What about the spare hard disks you mentioned, did you use one?

I used to visit those websites that you aren't supposed to visit. Picked up a few things besides what I went looking for. spent whole days cleaning out the nasties, wipe & restore is the preferred method. That's one reason I've always liked WinCE and many other pre PC machines that are ROM based.






Edited by dusty_dex 2013-04-26 9:25 PM