About to buy a Megatouch with problems

[sask]

Hi, I recently saw a Megatouch on a sales marketplace and its got a decent price. Poster says that the machine sometimes takes a while to boot, and sometimes will stop after 10 minutes. They didnt explain what happens, whether the machine turns off, or whether the screen turns off. I'm wondering if it may be worth it to purchase the machine and try to get it running properly. I'm looking at probably 630usd all in. I know this may be a hard question to answer so please if there are any resources you can point me to, i'd love to hear it. I'll be looking for manuals and other threads for a while.

[rogue]

Sounds like the CPU is overheating, those small fans always fail with time, I would replace the cpu fan and thermal paste, blow the dust out of the heatsink. As for the booting up time taking 10min, most of them have the old IDE mechanical spin drives, replace that with a IDE flash module and it will boot much much faster.  Hope that helps.

[sask]

Thanks. Any resources on replacing that flash module? Video or guide? I assume you are talking about the old HDD and i'm familiar with swapping out that for say a SSD but never flash media.

[rogue]

looks like this, same connections as IDE HDD

[rogue]

Create an image of the original drive and restore it onto the flash module, doesn't have to be 8GB, same size as original drive or bigger. Just can't be smaller.

[sask]

Okay yeah that was pretty much my next question. I'll look into creating that image. It sounds like this could be a good buy.

[Chris-socal]

Glad to see some technical content about Megatouch, fun machines.
However, did you say it is listed over $600?
That seems like a lot.
They are basically a small form factor PC squeezed into a box with a monitor.

[sask]

Yeah, 500 plus shipping. The working ones are listed for 1000 on Ebay. I havent looked on here yet.