Wondering re Compaq

If they've had clue-blows applied re proprietary hdwre? - needing special cases, fasteners and the like? (I realize they can no longer er customize the actual guts - and get away with it..)

My last run-in had to do with an old laptop needing a new m/board in final weeks of warranty - and several of their VPs spending about $500 in wasted time on series of phone chats, explaining why:

I could *NOT* pay the delta-$ for obtaining the exact same M/board (both of which were in *stock then) - except second one had a cache and my broken one didn't (!) It's Company Policy\ufffd that we do not upgrade systems [Oh Gawd - yes, exact words; never mind, well.. is the customer ever Right here?]

*in fact - they had several of the better ones; only one or 2 of mine!
I checked first.

I called a friend and next the Priv. Sec. of the Swiss? German? Pfeiffer-guy running the joint then; put on sweet reasonable voice and explained to her my er Problem. She was amicable and I think - persuaded I was asking a reasonably small alteration of CPolicy..

She got back and said that, The Great Man said.. [see above] {sigh}
ie a thoroughly unimaginitive organization in that, and other experiences. (Canon BTW - precise opposite, also Honda also Norton Motors)

Good luck then, with the New Cpq :-)

Ashton
yes.. left bad taste, perhaps obsolescent now (?)

It does have the usual Compaq strangeness of giving no indication of how to call up the CMOS settings on boot - but that might also be a WinMe "feature". I'm sure it's buried in the CD-ROM documentation somewhere.

I've finally cracked the case of my mom's 5WV280 system mentioned earlier (here or on ezboard). It's an Athlon 900/128/30/nVidia VANTA LT TNT2 8 MB video/CD/CD-RW/10-100 NIC/56k modem/Logitech QuickCam/etc. for $629 refurbished from Compaq.

It seems to use a Compaq "UWAVE" motherboard. It's got at least a partial VIA chipset (VT82C686A). There's another part of the chipset which is under a heatsink. The Athlon 900 has a giant fan/heatsink (TaiSol). There are lots of electrolytic capacitors around the Athlon, so they seem to have taken voltage regulation seriously. The board is around 9.5" square and seems to be fairly ATX standard layout. I don't have enough experience to know how standard it really is though...

The system has 1 free PCI slot (1 taken by the NIC, 1 taken by the modem) - 4 slots total (3 PCI, 1 AGP). It's got 3 RAM DIMM sockets, one taken by a DIMM with Infineon chips. It's got 1-3.5" internal HD bay free and 1-3.5" external bay free.

The power supply is 250 W.

It seems like a reasonable system, but I can't see the brand of parts used for the CD, CD-RW, HD without disassembling it more....

I noticed on Compaq's web page that the 7110US system (discussed at the start of this thread) is supposed to be available for $1299 (without monitor and speakers) at Compaq retailers. Man, they're not making it easy for me to resist....

Thanks for all the comments.

Cheers,
Scott.

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