Posted 2025-04-22 | Back to blog index
I spilled coffee in my laptop keyboard, destroying it, and Im sending it off to get repaired which will probably take a week or two.
So in the meanwhile I need a modern machine to do work on, TODAY, so I rushed to HARD OFF and picked up this Siemens PC for $60. It's part of HARD OFFs tested, non-junk range and has a 10 day warranty.
It comes with a Core i5-7500 @ 3.4 GHz with Intel HD 630 graphics, 4 GB RAM, a 500 GB spinning rust HDD and a DVD optical drive
The side of the case says MADE IN JAPAN, but the logic board and riser both say Designed and Assembled in Europe, so I guess this is a design from the former Siemens PC which Fujitsu acquired in 2009.
I had looked up images of the inside of the machine to verify it had M.2 slots, but upon opening it at home, they are not populated… oh well, would have been nice to have but no dealbreaker for what this machine is going to do.
Apparently the idle power draw is supposed to be just 16W so once I don't need it for work it could do some kind of serving duties (netatalk stuff?)
My main monitor is an Acer 4K display, you'd think it would work great with PCs, but for whatever reason it refuses to display the BIOS for this thing…
Time to bust out the chonky ADC adapter and plug it into a monitor with apparently much better compatibility - a 2000 Apple Cinema Display!
Ran out of Ethernet ports on my desk (since MARCHintosh there are a bunch of retro Macs living here) so I swapped out the 5 port switch for an 8 port one. Also learned that one of my 8 port switches is dead / power light goes on but none of the ports light up!
Linux is on the way!
(and yes I know I need to clean that keyboard)
Oh and the port selection is downright retro - we have PS/2, DVI, and when was the last time you saw a mains pass through port?
The two shields are for Serial and Parallel port options, the BIOS says they're present so maybe I can just pull a cable from a mobo header to install them? (edit: just noticed the COM1 header in the mobo photo in my second post in this thread!)
With these old ports I was worried the Ethernet wasn't going to be gigabit but luckily it is…
The 5400rpm HDD was just unusably slow, so I dropped in to BIC Camera to pick up a cheap SSD. The machine is usable now! Desperately needs a RAM upgrade too, ordered that online and it should arrive tomorrow.
When looking for RAM I was surprised to see UMAX still floating around out there, I'd never seen any of their products aside from when they had a Mac clone business in the 90's
The new RAM arrived, and just in time as 4 GB was not enough at all to get work done
So while my office setup is now actually really performant after the SSD and RAM upgrade (thanks to Linux having fewer animations than macOS, some things actually feel faster than my M1 Pro), my mobile setup is still a complete joke 😅
At least all I need to do this week is write and edit text, which this 17-year-old netbook running MX Linux can still manage fine.
I have this classic Mac-shaped USB-C PD charger, and with how the power points are mounted on this counter, it's super cute peeking out from under the lip ( ^ω^ )
(here's the thread from back when I bought this netbook for about $4)
https://bitbang.social/@kalleboo/110243041869147198
Remembered I had a spare 2.5GbE USB adapter, but it was USB-C so I had to pick up a pack of USB-C to USB-A 3.0 adapters to get some somewhat decent internet speeds on this thing
