Repair of 2 Agilent 54831 Oscilloscopes

11 hours ago

The author purchased two broken Agilent 54831 oscilloscopes for $200 at a flea market, both from the early 2000s.
Unit A, an Agilent 54831M with Windows 98, initially failed to boot due to a CPU seating issue, which was resolved by reinserting the CPU.
Unit B, an Agilent 54831B with Windows XP, had no hard drive or IDE cables; it was fixed using a CompactFlash adapter and a software image from an online source.
The CPU temperature alarm in Unit B was triggered; disabling it in BIOS and applying new thermal paste reduced temperatures from 64°C to around 40–65°C under load.
Both scopes were upgraded to 1 GHz bandwidth (equivalent to Agilent 54832) by removing a single resistor on the acquisition board, confirmed by improved rise time measurements.
Additional potential modifications include installing faster SSDs, upgrading to a higher-resolution LCD screen, or using a P4 motherboard, but the author opted for minimal changes.
The total repair cost was around $230, and after selling Unit A for $200, the author kept a fully functional 4 Gsps oscilloscope with 1 GHz bandwidth.

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