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Thread: Compaq on death march.

  1. #31
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    You ever see that scene in Office Space with the copier?

    Go ape-shat on the sucker with a baseball bat

  2. #32
    Gone Fishin' ukulele's Avatar
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    Win98SE will load too, but you need to zap the drive first. With win2000 it will format to NTFS first which essentially does the same thing. I must say that the later Compaqs are really cheap junk designs. Everything about them is poorly designed in my opinion. I just fixed two of them and don't care to mess with any more even if it is free.

  3. #33
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    Re: Compaq on death march.

    Originally posted by ukulele
    A friend dropped off a Compaq Presario 5240 and said he just wants it out of his life. He claimed it never worked right from day one and was returned while on warrenty several times. I pulled the crappy 110watt PSU out so I could see if the hsf fan was working. It was completely blocked by an IDE cable and was running way to hot. OK so I fixed that and now it is cooling fine. What it is doing is continually and unpredictably corrupting the harddrive. The harddrive was replaced and had a factory refurbished drive in it. It refused to reformat so I pulled the drive and hooked it up to my test computer. The drive works just fine in that junker and after reformatting and running through scandisk it looks fine. I put another smaller drive in the Compaq that I have been using as a backup drive for several months and tried a restore from the origional Compag restore disk. It refused to reformat the drive and promptly crashed. I managed to load win98se after several restarts and it worked for several reboots. Now that drive is getting currupted just like the old one. It too does not reformat right in the Compaq but is OK once it is reformatted in the test box. I think the cpu is fine as it runs from a boot floppy no problems at all, for hours on end. I suspect a bios viris. Is there another obvious reason why the hard drive would keep getting files corrupted only in the Compaq? I've checked all the obvious things like connections, ram and the other drives. Can a faulty PSU cause file corruption? It's a priority PSU and I have no spare to check it with. I am ready to scrap it for parts.
    i do pc-recyling. when i see a compaq i am always near a heart-attack. these stupid people wanted to invent there own standard. own bios etc. now we see what happens to such stupid ideas.... there is only one way if companies or people want to dictate us: boycotting!
    now they want us ging up w2k by giving up service: we will then use linux.
    they want us gving up floppy-drive. we will not buy such computers withouit floppy. these stupid barebone-bodies....
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  4. #34
    Ultimate Member Billforce's Avatar
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    Hey! I got this Compaq thing figured out some time back working on laptops for customers who complain of slow operation etc. FIRST use a partition killer like Killpart, then fdisk the drive into whatever partitions you deem are right for you. Format according to O/S. Open the driver directory on the restore disk from Compaq and unzip the drivers you want to install, save them to a file. I unzip to C:\unzipped, it will make it´s own sub-dirs. I then load my own O/S on the HD and install the necessary drivers from the unzipped dir. Without all the proprietary **** from Compaq the PC´s seem to run quit well. It takes a while to figure out which code is for which driver but worth the effort. I write down the list for future referrence.

    billforce
    ¨In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king!¨
    "Never corner something that's meaner than you are"

  5. #35
    Gone Fishin' ukulele's Avatar
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    Billforce, That's a pretty good approach. I did the same thing in a roundabout way and managed to load Win98 SE with a clean install. Perhaps we could collaborate on a book about iT. We can title it "The Desperate Compaq".

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