Haha! I guess I can't have my soup and eat it too! :lol:

I didn't get a lot of use out of the Compaq, so am miffed that I had to replace the vid card, modem, and HD.

I thought how I'd like to find an old parts machine with a small HD somewhere, just to get it running. Now with that in mind, I was out walking and someone had the Dell parked next to a garbage can and garbage bags. No one home, so I put it up on my shoulder and walked back to my house. I mean I see them here and there on the side of the road, (usually flying by in heavy traffic), so that was just what I was looking for. Didn't see a monitor and wasn't going to go through a load of trash looking for a mouse and keyboard. (Next time I'll keep this in mind when I see another).

That PC albeit circa 2004 is far better then the Compaq circa 2000, so that will be the top dog after my laptop. Lucky, I found it and it works like new, but max RAM is only 2 slots with 256mb each. Fortunately it has a filled slot with a 256mb, so I only have to buy one more strip. Works perfectly. Someone offered me a monitor back when they got a new PC, so that was that, I added a circa 1929 mouse and a Flintstones era keyboard. Altec Lansing speakers cheap at WalMart sound great and completed my Xmas present to myself. :cheesy:

There's probbably a good reason why it was there where it was.

Probably.

I plugged it in and expected my garage to explode. Most I had hoped for was to find a small working HD to reformat and put back into my Compaq temporarily.

No terrorist bomb or anything when I opened the case, so right now it's working perfectly on my network.

Maybe someone just got fed up with Windows and bought an Apple? :lol:

Reminds me of one monitor my brother.. errrr.. "acquired". Same store you just got that PC.

PC is working fine and became the main one of 4, and I added 533mhz RAM greatly shrinking the swap file and boosting overall performance. Luckily it's working well.

The Compaq that kept failing on boot got a drive swap to a smaller 13gb after the last failure. Compaq's notes said the PC can't handle anything over 60gb even with Win XP, so the 200gb I bought for it is now the slave. Knock on wood, it still seems to be booting fine.

Maybe you should scout for more?

I have this same exact problem on a new HP pentium with a serial (SATA) hard drive.
It looked like the problem might be the drive itself, until you mentioned you got the same problem with a new hard drive.
So maybe something to do with the controller(?).
I wouldn't think bad RAM would corrupt the boot sector, but who knows.
These intermitant problems are hard to fix. Mine may work for 2 weeks, and then crash, with a bad boot sector. Sometimes just fixing the MBR with a bootable utility CD fixes it.
Sometimes the whole drive needs reformatting. But the fact that it's formattable suggests the problem is something else.
None of my other machines does that

My problem turned out to be a problem with the D-Link wireless card and wireless router. This is undocumented and D-Link's customer support is superficial to the point of sheer annoyance. Return it under warrranty doesn't solve a problem internal to their components.

Apparently one tech website suggested turning off the "Turbo" mode on the router, and a number of users said that solved the problem. In my case, that was the fix and it's been running happily ever after.

I would never recommend D-link due to poor tech support with a product that was never fully tested. If you need references to the source links, I will look for them, but if you don't use D-link wireless stuff, this won't help you.

Much appreciate your feedback. My network card is a built-in Realtek PCI ethernet NIC. There are some bootable settings in the BIOS, and power management settings, that I will look at. That's very interesting. Will follow up when I find out.

Good luck.


That issue with the D-link failure and blue screen of death still exists if the router is set to turbo mode regardless of what PC the wireless card goes in.

This thread was posted over a long period of time and the original problem was a Compaq 7395 that kept crapping out a 250gb Western Digital drive. Compaq people said the mainboard wasn't rated to handle a drive larger than 40gb, and consequently I swapped in a small boot drive and set up a 200gb as a slave. I have never had it go down again.

The 250gb WD (upped to 300gb in a swap with them), went into an external case. Other than Ultra enclosures not being very well made, it works fine.

Turbo mode was turned off on the router and the found Dell works like a champ. I recently bought a 22" WS monitor for it and an external 500gb.