Good day all!
I was recently given one of these machines by my son in law (the usual bad power connector)
which I was able to fix by "treppaning" the case and cutting a hole underneath the upper keyboard cover to reach the terribly bad soldered joints. That parts all OK now.
However the system (which I want to use for some surveillance system experiments) has some VERY odd faults.
1. It has a very "washed out" screen, plenty of brightness, which is controllable in the usual way, but like a CRT display with the contrast control turned way down. This makes it very hard to read windows setup text for example.
2. It shows symptoms of a faulty hard drive in that it will not recover when booted from a legal
Windows CD. In fact after storing (apparently) all the data it proceeds to crash as soon as you agree to the windows agreement screen.
I must say that after spending over 25 years working on computer hardware this system has one of the most unfriendly BIOS setup routines I have EVER seen.
Anyone got any ideas? Otherwise it ends up in the bin and I've aquired yet another laptop power supply.
BTW my other laptop is an old Dell pentium 2 system running Windows 98 second ed.
That has been used in tough conditions in my Astronomical observatory for 5 years, was second hand when I got it and has never missed a beat.
Somehow I don't think that I would ever actually buy a Compaq or HP laptop after wht I've read here and elesewhere.