David L. Pederson
My Computer

My main home computer, Raspberry, is a Compaq Presario 5461. It was new in 1999, and is really out of date now. But it can keep up with my typing speed, and so I keep it around. I bought a Compaq monitor (17 inch) and printer (IJ750) at the same time as Raspberry.

When Raspberry was new, it had:

The motherboard was built by GigaByte. This surprised the heck out of me, because I always assumed that Compaq designed and built motherboards. Now I know that they just buy a bunch of stuff from Taiwan, final assemble it, and put it in a cardboard box. Heck, even I could do that… GigaByte has a newer flash BIOS for the board than Compaq, and lots of interesting info on the board. It is tempting to think about replacing the motherboard with a much more current model. But I have not done so.

I replaced the original keyboard, which sucked. We had a few surplus Compaq keyboards from Compaq Deskpros at work, which I really like, so I fished one out of the garbage and took it home. Much better, and no stupid network buttons, etc on the keyboard.

I added a much more RAM (256 MB), because the stuff is basically free, and it can't hurt.

Raspberry has gone through a few face-lifts over the years, either to update broken parts, or to expand capacity, etc. Some of these changes were stupid on my part, and I think it might have been better to put the money into a new machine. But then, what do you do with the old one?

The very first and obvious problem was that Raspberry would hang or reboot quite often. I now attribute this to Windows 98 Second Edition. With Windows NT4, Microsoft had proven it could make an OS that was stable. Then why would they continue to produce junk like 98 and ME? Eventually I replaced 98 with Windows 2000, which just plain works. The install went without a hitch.

The Compaq installed LG Electronics CD burner was a 4X model, quite the product in it's day, but that was a long, long time ago. I had replaced the unit with a 40X TDK, which was a major problem - TDK really dropped the ball (see Customer Service). Since then I bought 52X I/O Magic - it works really well. The only problem with the high X drive and a 500 MHz computer is that the computer can't keep up, so the real speed is more like 24X.

Monitor

The Compaq 17-inch monitor was a P.O.S. Never, never buy a Compaq monitor. It burnt out 3 months after the warranty expired, and was always fuzzy before that. I have replaced it with a Samsung SyncMaster 955DF, which I love.

Hard drive

Yup, it also failed a few months out of warranty, which by the way is 3 years if you buy the drive at a retail store, but 1-year on the installed drive. Do the Compaq assemblers do that much damage on the drives that the manufacturers knock off 2 years from the warranty??? I added a surplus 6 GB drive I have laying around for the boot disk, and added a 40 GB drive a few years ago, when 40 GB was the "sweet spot" for drive prices.

Last updated February 29, 2004

© 2004 David L. Pederson

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