Chuck(G) wrote:Compaq's like a lot of other companies. There are the high-end machines made for business and then there's the stuff for the home user.
I've just heard quite a few people describe the same experience I had with my home system from Compaq -- problem-prone and short lived. In three years, I had to replace an IDE controller, hard drive (separate instance), and finally balked at replacing the motherboard. The E-Machines we bought a few months after the Compaq is going strong five years later, with ZERO problems. We just took the drives and memory out of the Compaq and slapped 'em into the E-Machines, and it's become our family's print- and file-server, in addition to being my son's desktop.
Actually, my more recent experience with Compaq has been pretty favorable. My wife has a Compaq laptop that we've had for a couple of months now with nary a problem. It's been better in every measurable way than the Dell it replaced -- better performance, of course (Moore's law saw to that), but also a larger, clearer display, sturdier case, internal wireless that works MUCH better than any of the three external wireless solutions we'd tried with the old system, much longer battery life, DVD/CDRW -- and about $300 less, to boot.
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Joe Baker, who is considering purchase of another laptop, and leaning toward another Compaq.
) the restore disk for it. They'll send you (for $10 or so) a disk that will literally restore it like new. I did this when I lost my Compaq reload disk, and the replacement was XP (the original was Windows 98 ); you would probably get the same benefit from Dell.
Only thing replaced was the cd drive (I replaced it with a cd burner). By the way...my current machine is a Compaq Presario S6900NX.
