Do Compaq brand PCs still have special or different modes, settings, etc?
Years ago, Compaq computers often worked differently, especially concerning hardware issues and addresses and modes. Often software and hardware accessories would not work with them.
Is it still like that? I need a new PC soon and was just looking at some Compaq models at the local Best Buy, and they sure looked nice…
Stay away from the Presario line if you intend to upgraqde at all in the future. Personally, I’d stay away from Compaq altogether. The worst PC problems I ever troubleshot (troubleshooted?) were on Compaqs. Almost everything in them is proprietary, including the RAM. Get yourself a nice Dell instead, is my advice.
Don’t buy a Compaq! I bought one a few years ago and it died right after the warranty expired. It didn’t have too many proprietary parts to it, as I was able to successfully cannabalize the thing and am using many of its parts in my current computer. One of the things that I noticed Compaq did was to “tweak” Windows for some reason. I presume that they thought it would make the PC work better, I found that it caused the damn thing to crash all the time. The problem only being corrected when I did a full install of Windows from a MS disk and not the crappy “Quick Restore” CD that came with the PC. Additionally, I found Compaq’s tech support (which I needed to call often when I was running their version of Windows) is probably the worst I have ever dealt with. I refuse to even look at HP now that they’ve been assimilated by Compaq.
I agree with Q.E.D. and Tuckerfan. Back when I was buying PCs by the hundred (I was an information systems director), I banned Compaqs because of the endless problems we had with them (to be fair, the servers and laptops were way worse than the desktop PCs - proprietary stuff out the ying-yang).
I’ve been a Dell loyalist for many years, though the last PC I bought for myself is a Gateway that I’m very happy with (they were running a $100-off special through AARP, and had a fairly low-priced 17" flat panel display, so they beat the pants off Dell on price, at least at that brief moment in history!).
For reasons I’ll never quite understand, Compaq used to sell more PC’s than anyone else in the world. I fear that this fact is a sad commentary on the level of sophistication of the average PC buyer…
For the past ten years, I have operated a small home-based business geared toward repairing and upgrading PC’s for average people. Compaq has been largely responsible for the maintenance of my business. I would guess that nearly half of the PC’s I take in for fixing are Compaqs. (This percentage is up from the days when HP was a serious contender for “worst PC on the market.” Talk about a marriage made in hell!)
My advice: stay away from Compaq. Stay away from IBM. If you must go with a big player, consider Dell or Gateway. If not, gimme a call; I’ll fix you up with a KILLER system that doesn’t break every week.
Walk, no run far away from that Compaq. I have a Compaq and I have hated it from day one. You can’t upgrade ANYTHING becuase their towers are configured so weirdly, and you can’t even upgrade/replace the harddrive becuase they stick part of the BIOS on the harddrive, and even Compaq themselves can’t tell you how to retrieve it and put it on a new one.
Please, please tell me you are kidding.
The latest Athlon and P4 Presario desktop Compaqs are pretty standard mini-towers, are completely non-proprietary and have given me no problems. The current Compaq desktop price/performance is competitive with Dell and is far better than Sonys for general use.
I have been inside the guts of many Compaqs, Dells, HPs, Gateways etc. etc. etc. and for boxes made in the last year or two there is little if any functional difference between them.
HP has the worst fit and finish of the major players and their mini-towers make too many functional compromises case and access wise to achieve a small box size. Dell’s case switches have gotten better in the last year or so but were often fragile and poorly designed and were a huge headache a few years ago. Gateway is the most generic and least sophisticated case and component casewise but usually delivers a solid box for the money.
Compaq’s biggest problem (IMO) over the last few years has been insufficient attention to case design and potential over-heating issues. In the last year or so in terms of actual case and materials quality and internal MB design Compaq is probably on a par with Dell. Dell’s saving grace is that it never tried to get too small casewise and has generally had components that are relatively easy to swap out.
History may weigh against it but IMO the current Presario desktop series is fully competitive with Dell.
I don’t know whether it was the BIOS or not, but the Compaq I had at work definitely had something weird in a ‘maintenance partition’ on the hard drive. A reformat and reinstall with a standard Windows CD was right out.
On a time, the machine died. Instead of our IS people putting a thirty-dollar replacement power-supply in, we had to call in an authorized Compaq tech, pay $120 for a Compaq power-supply, plus pay labour for the replacement. The proprietary Compaq PS was a different shape that a standard power-supply.
There’s a pile of old PC hardware on the production floor, waiting for be auctioned off to interested employees. No-one I’ve talked to wants the Compaqs.
At work, I use a Dell now. At home, I have a generic white-box machine with standard parts.
Hmm. Mine had the same thing, but I had no problem doing a full install. Of course, I just threw the disk in the drive and let it go. I didn’t worry about whatever warnings the manufacturer had printed on the various pieces of literature which came with the thing. Nor did I try to reformat the drive before I did it. I just plunked the disk in there and let 'er rip.
How old is the system you wanted to upgrade? This was a circa late 80’s and early 90’s Compaq practice and and was discontinued in the early 90’s when BIOS ROMs become big enough to hold a reasonably large set of configuration options. I don’t think this has been done for almost 10 years now. How old is the system you are complaining about relative to this discussion of how 2003 Compaq desktops stack up to the competition?
Well, I have a Compaq Presario 6000 mini-tower. When I first got it I installed my CD burner from my old PC into it, and it worked fine. The burner is acting a little funny now, about a year later, but since it worked OK until recently I think the drive itself is failing.
Last week I installed a second hard drive for use with LINUX 9.0, and I had no trouble.
I give it a thumbs up.
I realize I didn’t explicitly state the most important fact, which is that I did nothing special or out-of-the-ordinary to get those two devices to work. They just worked.
2000, so starting it’s fourth year.
I could be dead wrong, I’m just going by the hundreds of replies I’ve gotten on a computer board I belong to. This is only my second computer (and my first was a Tandy with DOS and an 8088 processor, to give you an idea of how long I kept that dinosaur around!) I asked about both upgrading the processor and replacing the harddrive, and got reams of replies about how the first can’t be done (only replaced) and the second can only be done if you are an expert, which I am far from. Several even recited the steps they took to replace their hard drives, and they were right, I was not expert enough because I had no clue what they were talking about.
But if I’m wrong, feel free to correct me, and maybe I’ll email the folks who seem to know the most about what they are talking about and see if I can get some advice about my latest problem with this stupid machine*, since no one can seem to solve it!
So what’s the problem you’ve been having?
Compaq presario owner here. It’äs not like I had a chioce, since the company I worked for has Compaq, and the machine supplied to me, by the company for use at home, is a Compaq.
The compaq comes with two partitionings to the hard drive, with system save on d: But knowing what a piece of shit it is, I fryed the HD and re-installed everything from original (not Compaq) disks the day I got it. It’s worked fine since then.
Getting rid of Compaq’s “controll” panel and ‘digital dahsboard’ which are superomposed over Windows is a very good idea. That’ll make half the problems go away, right now.
Virtually any non-generic PC built by major manufacturer is normally going to have a fairly limited window of CPU MB upgrade possibilities simply because the units are built to narrow price and conformity specs and CPU upgrades are not something 95+% of their customers are ever going to need or want to perform. In real terms (and based on a long history doing this) it’s sort of a moot point for PCs older than circa 2000+ as PC’s 3-4+ or years old are so limited in terms of other upgradability issues (beyond CPU aspects) they are not really worth the effort of making CPU upgrades due to the relatively low cost (few hundred dollars in may cases) of fully configured modern PCs that are an order of magnitude more capable.
As to hard drive upgrades older late 90’s PCs had (variously) 540 meg, 2 gig or 8 gig OS/BIOS limitations. Again this limitation was true of all major manufacturers depending on the BIOSes they chose to place in their machines. Your choices are/were to use a software based BIOS extender or a separate IDE controller card that allows for larger drives. Compaq was no different than most other major manufacturers in this although they were not always on the cutting edge of ease of upgradability for their lower cost desktop Presarios, and this limitation cost them in many ways, mainly in terms corporate desirability.
Times change for manufacturers. From a historical perspective I can say with some confidence that I have never seen a more precisely engineered box than the 20 meg drive, 1 RAM, Compaq Deskpro 386s I purchased in 1987-88. It cost approx $ 3,000. and it was made like a absolute jewel. They were masterpieces of engineering. It’s hard nowadays to understand that level of craft as everything is built to lowest cost spec.
Get a VPR Matrix =]. They recently got rid of my model, which is a 180r. The one i linked to is the closest in price and specs as mine. About $1000. It’s pretty good. If you need a lot of help with computers, I don’t expect their support to be top notch, though. It’s Best Buy’s house brand. I don’t expect their warranties to be too good either, but they have pretty high end parts for a low end price.
I’ll give my usual advice. If you want a new computer and care at all about standards-compliance and upgradability, go to a local computer shop and have them build you one. You’ll be supporting local business, and have someone local to go to with any issues. If you do decide to go OEM, AVOID DELL. They use proprietary power connections that will fry non-Dell devices such as motherboards or fans that you try to put in the system. You can plug them in fine, you’ll just get a lovely sizzle and smoke when you turn on the power. Of the major OEMs, Alienware is very expensive, but top quality. They come closest to the level of performance you’ll get from a home-built.
I’d say it depends on what s/he needs the new PC for. No sense getting a gamer rig like an Alienware if all that’s going to be done is word processing and Solitaire.