HP Brio BA600

[goodpsusearch]

I found it some days ago.

The modem it had inside is completely burnt...

The motherboard is full of bad caps that are not only bulging but also leaking from the bottom side.

It had a LiteOn PS-5900-2H psu that seems to be ok.

I would like to power it on and see if it boots.

[ratdude747]

Re: HP Brio BA600

is it worth it? that is a PIII katmai board, the best you could do is a coppermine (slot a package or s370 in a slocket)...

it was worth a lot back then, $1449 usd... see:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/15861/hp_brio_ba600.html

recap it, as those iq caps will both dry up, bulge, and leak. they are made by OST, and they seem to be even lower in quality.

then again, it looks like a power surge went to the phone jack... ouch... but the board should be all right, it looks like the modem took the blow.

[Krankshaft]

Re: HP Brio BA600

From the looks of it that modem got fried by a lightning strike to the phone line. I'm willing to bet improper or no grounding at that homes telephone interface box.

Oh well not like anyone uses those 56K dinosaurs anymore anyways .

[Scenic]

Re: HP Brio BA600

Wasn't Brio the office/business line and Vectra the consumer/home stuff (?)
or was it vice versa!? *confused*

[goodpsusearch]

Re: HP Brio BA600

It boots!

It was able to boot from cd and floppy and start xp setup. Maybe, I will recap it sometime.

[kc8adu]

Re: HP Brio BA600

Wasn't Brio the office/business line and Vectra the consumer/home stuff (?)
or was it vice versa!? *confused*

vectra is the business line.

[toastygoodness]

Re: HP Brio BA600

brio was the confusing sub-business line. then sometimes it was also the high-end business.... :-/

[ratdude747]

Re: HP Brio BA600

all i know is my dad once had a Pmmx vectra XA that was the biggest turd. stupid lpx, nothing standard. the floppy never worked right. it was a POS is i ever saw one.

[Scenic]

Re: HP Brio BA600

i still have an old HP Vectra VE 5/133 around (P133 original, now P200MMX)
http://kehler.us/Kehler_Computer/vectraVL166.jpg
^looks somewhat like that one.. except mine had a different (more modern) button-frontpanel, didn't have USB, had the "extra PCI slot" on the left of the back, holding a dual-port 10 + 10/100 LAN Card

seems to be damn near impossible to find that exact model on the net.
but yeah.. have to agree.. everything proprietary. quite a PITA..
plus, those boxed had the tendency to have dried up SMD lytics all over the board, causing all sorts of flakiness -.-

if it runs it's pretty neat though.. loudest part in my one is the HDD (~15GB Seagate).
using it for retro-gaming on DOS 6.22/Win98SE (all those games that don't work properly on newer machines / OS's)
S3 Trio with 2MB onboard + a Voodoo II + a Soundblaster 16 ISA

edit: this is the first computer i bought over ebay back in 2000 through my mom's account
lotsa memories.. and one of the main reasons why i didn't trash it yet..

[ratdude747]

Re: HP Brio BA600

that's it. my dad bought it in 2002 (i think) because he had some nice simms sitting around... it ran 95 and 98 ok, but it always complained about the floppy... i still have the 2.5gb quantum drive that was stock, it still runs which is miraculous for a quantum. it was the most propietary turd i have ssen without a piece of fruit for a logo... and i have seen dell gx and sx units... that vectra was such a pain for us...

it had a 166 mhz mmx... it also had a weird LAN card built in (the blank spot on yours by the lock, i still have the card and odd bracket. it had separate 10 base t and 100 base t ports. pci as well, look at the back of the riser card and you will see the unused slot.

the stock sound was nice... 4 channels! only thing was it was ISA and the damn proprietary audio panel connection (yours doesn't have it, it was a headphone jack with a sliding volume control, where the blank panel below the power switch is on yours)... the nice thing it had was a lan light in the front by the hdd and power lights.

it also had an 8x cd drive in it. yours is blank... odd...

i still have the LAN card, the sound card, the audio front panel ( i tried to mount in another case ages ago, when i was a dumb and 14, still leanring how to wrench computers), the hard drive, the matrox graphics card, and the cd drive... the rest was trashed... wish i had kept it...

come to think of it, the front switches and lights were a bit different... it looked like this pic i found online:




see the front audio?

[Scenic]

Re: HP Brio BA600

yeah..
the one i have is sort of a mix-up between those 2 pictures.

the left part of the frontpanel looks like the one in the pic. in post #9, the middle part with the buttons looks like the in the pic you posted above (minus the audio part.. that was just blank as mine didn't come with a soundcard originally)

on the back, mine also had that LAN card you mentioned. except mine had some weird card in there that had 2 cards on one.. one 10MBit only and another one with 10/100MBit..

i've bought another one of those comps to make a fli4l router out of it for a friend of mine back like 6 or 7 years ago. that one also had that strange special-slot LAN card, but it was a single card with seperate inputs for 10 and 100MBit instead of 2 cards in one like mine had.. bummer..

the floppy drive is a bone standard one (apart from being grey-ish instead of beige).
mine is now fully loaded..
128MB 72pin PS2 SIMMS (max. this thing can handle)
P200 MMX, 15GB Seagate HDD with tons of partitions (board has 8GB BIOS limit, ontrack diskmanager helps)
Teac 8x4x32 CD-RW, LS120 floppy (plus the standard one)
onboard S3 Trio upgraded from 1MB to 2MB (has no AGP )
redneck-recapped mainboard (surface mount caps replaced with an armada of through hole lytics held (in parallel to the board) in place with double sided tape )
aaand *drum roll* a 512KB COAST (Cache On A STick) module

feels amazingly fast now (considering how old it is).. was a real slug before i refurb'd it (caps + upgrades)

edit: HA! found pics of one that looks exactly like mine

http://pchistory.ru/hp-vectra-xm-5133-series-4.html

specs and stuff:
http://www-pc.uni-regensburg.de/hard...o/xm4index.htm

now that i see it.. this thing also had the "HP Instant On" feature.. hit the spacebar to turn it on. was possible cause it had a crude standby voltage system.. "instant on" didn't work with all keyboards though