Mrs. Huffman’s first grade class experiment.

Here is one of my first shots with it.

For the past few months my wife’s HP Slimline S3020N computer has been giving me troubles when I turn it off for awhile and then try to turn it back on. Sometimes it wouldn’t turn back on and I would have to hit the power supply casing to make it work. Well we came home from a 10 day vacation and it wouldn’t turn on at all.

So I took it apart because I had to get out the hard drive to extract some info for my wife so she could use our laptop. I took out the power supply and looked around on Google for others with similar issues with this power supply. My thought was if there were enough complaints about it that I would ditch the 2 year old computer and get her another since it was pretty inexpensive to begin with. But lucky not many complaints.

So I shopped around and found most replacement units for the HP Pavilion S3020N 5188-7520 to be in the $80 to $100 range. That sound like too much for me so I found a refurbishment unit for $45 on Ebay from a guy named Kyle that had a good reputation there. Within 3 days I had it in the mail.

So I created this video on how to replace the HP PSU because the Slimline is so compact it is not easy to figure out how to pull stuff out.

I hope it helps someone out there with the same issue I had. Hopefully I will get another 2 years out of this PSU before I get her a new computer.

It worked great.

Music by Kevin MacLeod. (great site.)

I just got a new HP Mini 311-1025NR netbook for $499. From what I understand it is the only netbook in its class that has HDMI output with NVIDIA ION graphics.

I was looking for something small and lightweight for under $500 that could also be connected to a HD TV and output 1080 video.

So the first thing I did was to remove all the HP software it comes with. I love HP (I own 3 HP computers) but they bloat it up with a bunch of unnecessary software that runs on start up. Since this machine only has 2gig of RAM I wanted to make sure that it had all it’s resources free before I tested it.

Below are photos I took connecting up the HP to my TV with an HDMI cable.

Hulu

The first test I did was Hulu as you can see above. As you can see RAM is not an issue, the ATOM processor is. You can see the CPU is maxed out in the picture above. I tried both hi quality and low quality settings on the Hulu player and they both had tons of shuttering about once a second.

Youtube

Youtube did a bit better but it was still maxed out but shuttered a bit less. I caught the end of the video when I took the photo above, you can see the CPU dropped after it finished, but just look at the history of where it was.

QuickTime

Since I was disappointed with Flash so I tried QuickTime next with a downloaded 720p file from Vimeo. It was also very disappointing in the amount of shuttering on playback. Pretty much just as bad as Flash, that was a surprise to me I thought QuickTime would be less CPU intensive.

Mirillis Splash Lite

The big surprise was playback of my local AVCHD files that I took with my camcorder being played back with the Mirillis Splash Lite player. Check out the CPU usage – much better! It worked great with no shuttering at all. It looked great in full screen mode. Check out my other post on the Splash player.

I also tried the Splash player on the .mov file that I downloaded from Vimeo (TimeScapes from Tom Lowe) and it played great with the same 50% CPU usage.

Vimeo HTML5

On a side note I tried Vimeo with both Flash and HTML5 and they both dragged the CPU into submission. I thought that HTML5 would have been less CPU intense.

Conclusion

So I am a bit disappointed that I can’t play Hulu full screen on my TV. But it’s not that big of a deal because I plan on buying the Boxee Box in a few months.