Lowly G6 i3 turned rogue

OK, since a few here have seen my first thread on Dell inspiron being a wolf in sheep suit. I decided to spend a wee bit of coin on recycling my old G6 (XGA, 1st Gen CPU, 4GB) main board, and popping in 2nd Gen hardware with minimal mods to the chassis.

Even though the newer system Board does not spec any newer CPU architecture, other than 1st gen, I decided since it is a 65 series chip set, why not take the plunge?

Because I do not like copy cats, no he part numbers are used in reference. That means no making money from my work!

Within 15 minutes my G6 was torn down. Another 5 minutes for a quick and dirty test for boot up with new 4 core CPU running 45watts, instead of 35w, which was standard.

Windows 10 had updates so my system boot speed improvement was canceled out right away. Though no issues with boot. Makes me wonder if I should have tried a bigger i7. Mwhahahahahaha!

Actually the cheaper i7 is like less than 7% slower. So why pay more for not much more if any thing? Right!

Now the big bad mod of all mods to make the system stable under stress. Time destroy a few heat sinks and mod the mother board. Yippee!

Since nobody ever uses the antiquated VGA connector on the laptop anymore, it will be removed from my new System Board for adding room, to add extra heat sink and ventilation. Wooot! Wooot! Mwhahahahahaahaha!

Outside of creating damage, I happen to have a Full HD panel with all the trimmings. The G6 was never offered with such a panel, so why not add one!

All I need to do is customize an inf, to allow full hd panel configuration to override bios blocking of the panel, since it may not be in the white list.

But I will need to pin out both system Board and the connector that mates from the panel. Since this panel has free (un-glued pins for ease of pin swapping) doing a wee reconfiguration of the pins on the connector, will allow proper operation.

Right now I am too busy, and will try to make time through the month on my weekends. Hopefully by the end of the month, success! Mwhahahahahaahaha

 

Oh yeah! This bad boy got some some spunk! I figured a good way to keep from modding the VGA video port, for better cooling. I did a trick from HP them selves. Have dual heat tubes, with their own heat sink. As it is required with the dedicated Radeon chip. The Intel graphics probably would cook with Full HD display attached.

In the middle of customizing the heat tubs with heat pad fixtures to match board layout. One thing I did add is chip set cooling, the funky stamped sheet metal don't cut it.

I am totally stoked big time on this mod. Building a wee wolf pup in a sheep suit I am. Ha!

Had to upgrade memory as well, the speed was too slow for this motherboard CPU combo.

The only thing that had value was the Barracuda SSD hybrid drive, that is being used.

When done my $150.00 upgrade package will make this old G6 a nice backup laptop when needed. My original G6 was on its last leg with Windows 10. Would not attempt to sell, the way ito was.

 

I did a bunch of OS testing and found windows 10 the best performer and nicely usable on all but games. Since I am not a gamer, I am not concerned the HD 7400M graphics is no longer properly functioning with the latest build of Windows 10.

I did get as far as enabling all the features, though the bios limits function with GPU, as Fixed instead of Dynamic. The only trouble is the GPU, with 2nd Gen architecture is phased out. Even the latest build of 8.1, has issues. Tried Fedora, and other Linux distros, and was feeling I was going backwards in justifying having a switching GPU functioning.

Even 3rd Gen peeps have issues as well, so my option to squeeze in a 3rd Gen Envy main board, would have been just a waste of money. Considering I only paid $70 for the i7-2720QM CPU and H65 system board.

As for the display conversion to IPS LED Full HD... could not ruin a perfectly good display from an Elitebook. After all the Windows 10 x64 drivers I am using are from an Elitebook. At least HP does support some hardware longer than 7 years.

One word of advice, Intel and MS both consider 2nd Gen hardware obsolete and unsupported. Once you gather all the drivers and find the highest revision to install, the support comes from the manufactureres. Without all the drivers I manually installed, Windows 10 would not have identified the hardware. This is the first time I ever seen Windows not properly configure old hardware, usually it's the other way around, like with my latest Dell. It took a month after release for updates to catch up to the hardware.

Now that the AMD GPU is disabled in device manager, and proper hardware configurations with all the drivers. Everything operates no less than it functioned 8 years ago. Actually better, since the touch pad has a much better interface. The CPU actually runs cooler than the i3, even though it's 10 more watts.

Want to know why? The i3 is 2 cores the i7 is 4 cores. It actually uses less power to run when at 50% or less utilization, while the i3 will be greatly above 50% just to keep up. More cores, more effecient. Oh I did do a test with baking my laptop. Ran GPU and CPU in game mode. A single heat sink is not good enough, though it did not go into over heat, until driver failed when in switching and locked up.

As for performance gained, mostly moving up to faster ram, which the CPU supported, and having 2 extra cores, did wonders. It will make a good desktop performer with office work. Browsing is much more snappy, and even disk caching for startup makes it seem more new than old.

The problem I see with older laptops sold with Windows 10, is that they are fresh installes, and with laptops that barely have any 8.1 support. The difference you will see between my laptop is how well the hardware is done within device manager. Side by side a noticeable difference.

Anywho... I will use my nice display on something more worthy.

As for my g6, it's not so old anymore, though it begs for the display swap. Maybe if I run across another, I may take time with the swap.

Oh, another thing... I will try and disable wifi white listing. I think I can get to pin 22 on the pci slot for the wifi. If it is easy to reach, I can install a switch to disable connection. Pressing it during boot for a few seconds, will allow installation of a faster WiFi card. The old one is only good up to 150mbps. I have another that will do 300mbps, but needs the mod to function.

 

For anyone finding issues with Education or Enterprise, you will need to hack the registry to release virtualization of the systems protected folders. Once done they play much better with old hardware. Haven't tried a none virtualiation CPU, but I took advantage on my i7, and enabled Defender, which started the mess.

System works just as good and as speedy as any average gen 3 or 4 laptop. So finding cheap gen 2 H65 and H67 systems and loading Enterprise will make Windows 10 a pleasant upgrade from past versions of Windows. The big plus is Android and Linux compatiblity but in, with virtual box and upgraded security second to none, when implemented.

 

I did a few tests with various AMD drivers, with the most recent Intel driver, having the igrfx control panel disabled, running the latest control panel from MS store.

The hidden MS AMD driver I had to select and download from Windows Update as cab files, seemed better than what you can obtain from manufacturers and from AMD. The best were WMMD drivers. Though none of the drivers are perfect. The key to stability is keeping the bios set at fixed and not installing ccc2. In fact disable the AMD card with a loaded driver. The system runs cooler and has no boot or screen issues. I tried to allow partial DGPU usage for video conversion perposes, but sleep mode sends laptop into a heater oven when not used. Had a few blips come up as well. So with that seen, no guarantee with AMD. Intel all the way.

 

After some time with my setup, I looked deeper into optimizing. Found a few more expensive HP laptops have pretty much the same hardware. So I grabbed all the windows 10 drivers and apps I could and created a mini Envy Probook.

Hp has a few 3rd party apps that can be fully upgraded with a product update patch.

I removed all the speed improvement apps HP and Intel pushed on Windows 8.1 and 10, as they did nothing but create a bunch of issues.

The only hack I needed to do other than a switch to disable Micro Pci-e WiFi card during boot, was to add dell info into the registry for their Mobile App.

I did note some apps on Microsoft Store will not install because of hardware limitations. Not a lot of them, but seems like a Google thing, some laptops are not in the white list. May have to tweak my Dell registry hack for the store to think I have Alienware or XPS hardware. MWHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Here is a list of higher end HP features that fully function on a Pavilion G6 1000 series.

Windows 10 Enterprise
UEFI support utilities 5.2x
IDT Beats for Windows 10
HP Recovery OS Download Tool (download any Windows 10 recovery for supported hardware, great for supporting multiple HP Laptops and Desktops)
Fully functional CyberLink suite with PDVD12 (updated 2018)
Dell Mobility application.
Intel Windows 8.1/10 drivers (only one of the many tested, truly supports proper hardware enabling and function)
Most of all the hardware uses drivers specifically made for Windows 10, none from HP site.

Even though the laptop is 10 years old, Windows 10 built in fast boot rocks. No need to get NVME, the RAM and HD are fast enough.

Even though I am packing a 45 watt cpu, the laptop runs just as cool as the original i3. Both Intel graphics GPU and CPU run about 50° C during Web browsing and business work.

Windows 10 runs so much better than all the Linux distros I tried, without all the mess of trying to get the AMD HD 7400M to function. Which is now disabled completely for the better. Though it would have been nice to offload graphics to the dedicated GPU for conversion processes and for a higher resolution external interface.

Not having the capability made my FHD wide angle display upgrade go on hold for another build that can use it proper.

I may have a go at installing an Envy Webcam (720p 60fps) since the G6 only has a lowly 640 24fps webcam.

Since the software can do Blu-Ray, I may Frankenstein the DVD tray to hold a Blu-ray RW. I should have bought more of them, early blu-ray RW, just did not think Sony firmware would flash proper until I hacked the code during flash using a programers tool.

Anywho, the build now is as if it is fully HP supported, without all the HP support tool junk installed. Compared to what most will do with slapping in a fresh windows 10 install, the extra work with finding proper drivers makes it operate a lot cleaner and quicker.

After all my work, the H65/H67 chipset is not dead yet. Don't know why it's not supported, other than forcing people to upgrade. Seems good enough to live another 5 more years or so, hardware limiting.