I didn’t set out to build something modern, my goal was to revive an older HP Pavilion a1640n and bring it back into active use, not as a novelty, but as a working system that handles gaming and media the way it would have in its prime.
Cleaning and First Power-On
The system needed attention right away. Dust was packed into every vent and fan, and the thermal paste had long since dried out. I pulled everything apart, cleaned it thoroughly, and reapplied fresh paste to the CPU. Once reassembled, airflow was noticeably better and temperatures stabilized where they should be.
Both hard drives were tested using S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics and passed. That was a relief, since replacing IDE and early SATA drives is not always straightforward in a twenty year-old system.
Hardware Changes
The original, onboard graphics wasn’t going to cut it, so I installed a Gigabyte GeForce GT 730 with 2GB of DDR3. It gave me HDMI output along with the VGA, which made the system more compatible with modern displays.
This system was a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 model for watching OTA TV and media encoding. So I removed the Dell OEM eHome Wonder Card that I couldn’t get to work correctly due to the difficulty in finding these legacy drivers and replaced it with an ATI Theater Pro 650 tuner card. Even so, this proved not to be just a drop-in upgrade. It became one of those components that works great once it is set up, but getting there was a pain in the ass.
Multi-Boot Configuration
Instead of partitioning a single drive, I kept things simple and separated the operating systems physically.
- Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 installed on the 500GB drive
- Windows Vista Ultimate with Media Center installed on the 240GB drive
Each operating system lives on its own disk, which avoided a lot of the usual bootloader conflicts that come with shared partitions.
I used Vista’s boot manager to detect XP, and Add it to the Windows Boot Manager by first installing XP on drive 0 and then installed Vista on drive 1. It kept the two environments clean and prevented one OS from interfering with the other.
Getting the TV Tuner Working
The ATI Theater Pro 650 turned into the most time-consuming part of the setup. Drivers were inconsistent, legacy applications were unreliable, and Media Center wouldn’t complete setup without an analog tv signal, or allow access to Composite RCA Input from a VCR/DVD Player in either Win XP MCE or Vista Ultimate.
It took an inordinate number of attempts using different driver packages before both XP Media Center and Vista Media Center recognized the card properly.
Because of the Digital television transition in the United States, I knew that the analog input was going to be the only practical route, so I connected the Theater Pro 650 tuner directly to a DVD player over composite RCA to test it. That is where things started to fall apart. Media Center simply would not recognize the composite input at all, no matter how I configured the tuner or reinstalled drivers.
I worked around the issue by switching to VirtualDub for capture, which introduced its own set of problems. Getting the correct capture device, input source, and codecs properly configured took multiple attempts before it would consistently display video with audio. Even then, it only worked reliably under Vista. XP never fully cooperated with the setup so, even though the drivers were installed correctly, I abandoned XP MCE as an option and relegated composite capture to Vista.
Final System Configuration
After everything was configured and stable, the system looks like this:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 at 1.8GHz
- 4GB DDR2 RAM
- 500GB drive dedicated to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
- 240GB drive dedicated to Windows Vista Ultimate
- Gigabyte GeForce GT 730 graphics card
- ATI Theater Pro 650 tuner card
- DVD RW optical drive
- USB 2.0, Ethernet, WiFi, FireWire
- Digital audio input and output
- Multi-format memory card reader
Both operating systems are fully configured, drivers are installed, and activation is complete. After reaching a stable point, I created a full backup image of the XP boot drive and stored it on the secondary disk.
Accessories
To round things out, I paired the system with a Thermaltake mechanical keyboard, a wireless mouse, Creative Labs speakers with a subwoofer, and a DVD player.
Final Thoughts
This build ended up feeling like far more work than it was worth. This Pavilion a1640n now runs two separate operating systems on two separate drives, handles older games without issue, and plays/records composite video signals without any problems.