OT: New Compaq *&^%$#!

Someone at the store might be able to delete the crapware that is causing problems. At work we bought an HP once, never again.

The basic box may be okay, it's worth a try.

My brother bought a Compaq once, said never again. "Ya should have bought a Dell"

Lane

FORGET IT WITH COMPAQ!!

I paid 2800 plus for a state of the art laptop and fought problems for a year returning it twice to their techs...finally after it was an obsolete machine a tech told me on the phone Compaq had installed tons of faulty processors and knowingly delayed/denied replacement! He had me send it back a third time and with his service order attached replaced the processor...now tho obsolete it works fine. Since HP bought Compaq I no longer buy anything from either company! Shame since I really liked HP printers and scanners but NO MORE! Never ever buy anything from Compaq and now include HP! I don't mind anybody having a problem but when they lie over and over they can kiss my ass goodbye!

T Bone

Carl Byrns wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Celeron was the first bad thing.....with 1/2 the cache...they are slower than smoke off ..... I would recommend taking it back, saying it was junk, and getting either an AMD XP or a P4 machine. You will pay more for the P4. I never have liked Compaq, every one I've ever had the misfortune to work with (on) has had some type of problem. My wife has a HP with Celeron 700 mhz, 190 mb RAM. My server is a PII

450 mhz with 190 mb RAM....the PII 450 will run circles around the 700 mhz Celeron.

In all the computers I've owned, worked on, or built, Compaq rates at the absolute bottom of my list. They use cheap or outdated components and propriatary parts that need Compaq-specific (read: poorly written and bug laden) drivers. Always slow, crash-prone, and incompatible. BIOS setups are lousy and sometimes don't see some devices. One example that comes to mind is a whole bunch of Compaq modem pulls that I never could get working right. The Pioneer DVD drive mass failure a while back.

The used Compaqs I find end up being memory, parts, and CPU donors to real computers.

GTO(John)

The first big question is..which version of XP are you encumbered with? Home or Professional?

XP Home is marginally better than ME. marginally being measured in the angstrom range. Along the lines of..would you rather catch your dick in your zipper, or pound your thumb with a hammer...

XP Pro, on the other hand..is actually a pretty decent OS, assuming you have the horsepower to run it. Ive a 500mhz AMD that has been rock solid, uptime now about 6 months, and has the usual accouterments..webcam, scanner, DVD player, CD writer, network card,

56k dialup etc etc. Thats the wife/kids machine. Pretty bullet proof.

The machine I post at home from (this one) is a 500mhz Micron, picked out of a dumpster, now running under Win98SE. Both machines have

512mgs ram and a couple decent sized harddrives.

A 350mhz Compac that I post from in LA, an older unit, seems to be ok, but is still slower than my old machine, (now the server here at home) which is a Tyan Tomcat, but its been reasonably reliable and fast enough. I need some more ram..shrug.

Your blown machine..you should have simply stuck in a new motherboard

Aseus, Soyo, Tyan (in no particular order) are decent boards when matched with a good CPU.

Gunner

" ..The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age... I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity, bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity, fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We *assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation to keep the State out of the church business, we've destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*. Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives

Compaq does require some motherboard/device specific drivers, but they are available free on their website.

since Compaq & HP merged...shrug

Gunner

" ..The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age... I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity, bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity, fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We *assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation to keep the State out of the church business, we've destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*. Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives

First: Are you running any AV like Norton or Mcgafee? If so, you are better off with a virus! What else is in startup? PURGE IT! Yes, Compaqs suck but you can format it and start over with a non-proprietary OS, device specific drivers, and keep the crap to a minimum. Put XPP and SP1 and all the criticals on. I just did this to 13 workstations that were so boggered up with crap they wouldn't do Word.

Yeah all the crap software they preinstall is a real pain. If it came with just a windows xp cd, which I doubt it did.. I woudl reinstall just xp and then install what software you want on it.. Xp really needs atleast 256 meg ram to run right and some of the cheaper computers are only coming with like 128mg ram. I agree I don't like the Compaq computers. I have been building my own for awhile now and love the results.. As far a Xp home and Xp Pro... Same basic OS....with XP Pro having some more bells and whisltes aimed more at and office enviroment. Its not like the older Win 98 and Win

2000 where there was a major differnce.

Jeff T.

I would have done just that, but my daughter needed the machine Right Now and Socket 7 mobos are becoming flea market items. XP is supposed to be built around the unix kernal, but it looks as though MS has figured a way out to screw that up. I got a lengthy response from Compaq/HP detailing what has to be done to make the machine work. I did all those things and it does run much better- it had a number of background processes running that are utterly useless.

-Carl

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 04:38:21 GMT, Carl Byrns brought forth from the murky depths:

C: Both of the above.

Do yourself a favor. Take it back to the store and get your money back. Then find a nice clone builder just several blocks down the street from you and have him build a box for you.

I used to build my boxes, now I have it done. I replace the box with one 10 times more powerful and capable every two years. Originally that cost about $1,400. Now it's under $1k and I'm up to 19" displays. Talk to a box builder. They have to warranty the stuff and they know what works and what doesn't. Use the little guy who CARES what happens to you and your box. _He_ wants your repeat business while all the big-box stores/corporations don't even know you from Adam.

As the parts get to be commodities, they get cheaper, less well-designed, and more prone to early failure. It is my opinion that Compaq, et al, are corporations whose main effort is to make their stockholders wealthy. Do you think they care if we get bent over in the process?

(I've spent 50 years perfecting my cynicism. ;)

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Larry sez: "(I've spent 50 years perfecting my cynicism. ;)"

And a fine job you've done! Your cynicism is one of the rare types that is based on truth and a good deal of research in the topic at hand. IMO, cynicism is not a negative characteristic at all. No. Cynicism from the right source is like diamonds in the rough; still gems! The same goes for "proper sarcasm"; when done correctly sarcasm is truth flavored with wit.

Bob (a rose by any other name is still a rose) Swinney

What he said - in spades!

(Snip)

And that ain't all. On Wintel boxen, do a CTRL-ALT-DEL and select the 'Processes' tab. You will see all the pieces of software currently running on your machine. Most of them are necessary. Some are virii. Some of the virii masqerade as duplicates of vitally necessary Windows executables.

Here is a secret decoder ring that defines many of them:

For others, just paste the name of the task in question into Google.

When you have your list of deletable tasks, you will need to research them further to find out how to delete them. Much of the time this requires mucking about in the Registry.

When I did this, I cleaned out 20 MB of executables running on my laptop. It worked better, after that.

--Winston

Compaq has also been known to use non-standard form factor motherboards. So industry standard parts wouldn't fit, and you'd need a new case and power supply anyway. Don't know if that's still true, I gave up on Compaq years ago.

I quit assembling my own computers a few years ago when it became cheaper to get a generic house brand system from one of the big chain computer stores. My newest system is a PowerSpec from Microcenter. I priced out the parts from the usual Taiwan wholesalers, and I couldn't beat Microcenter's price.

That's a myth. XP is not unix kernal based. But there is a better operating system which is, called Linux. :-)

Gary

You hit it right on the head- Compaq/HP tech support e-mailed a whole list of "services" (their word) of stuff to disable, including one major memory hog. The machine seems to be running OK now.

-Carl

Don't know if they're the same now, but I've had several compaq's, hated all of them. They didn't use a standard version of windblows, if you needed an upgrade, it had to come from them. (Still have an old compaq 486 in the attic, needs a week to ten days to boot up.)

More than half of the problems you have and will continue to have are from XP. The most common thing you will see: "This program has encountered a problem and needs to close." Ya gotta love it when you see that report after you've closed out everything else, then told windblows to shut down. When it comes to XP, Just say Linux instead.

Is it possible? Analogy: My wife doesn't care the vehicle make, model, or brand of gas in the tank. She just wants to get to where she needs to go with a minimum of hassle.

The last time I played with *nix it still required lots of propeller-head stuff. Has Linux improved so that a non-techie can run it?

-- Mark