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Compaq Presario + XP????

R

RickH

Senior member
Help!! I have a Presario PIII 650 with 512 MBs of memory that constantly locks up after our IT department installed Win XP. The claim it is too old (it's less that 2 years) to work with XP and that it was designed only for ME--note sticker on the front. I don't buy it. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft XP is not backwards compatible with a 2 year old machine. Is anyone running W2k or XP on this laptop?? Thanks..R
 
Who's claiming that?

Compaq flat out won't support their hardware under any OS other than the OS that ships with the hardware. Period.

Now, they *should* say it just like that. Some support folks try to imply incompatibilities, which is usually hogwash.
 
Are all your programs XP compatable?

Is your company trying to us a managed desktop and you don't have developer rights?

Managed desktop won't allow you the install anything nor change a lot of settings unless your the true admin or have developer rights. It also helps your IT and legal departments track who exactly has what software an if its legal becuase you can't install anything without permission.

As far as it not working on a compaq with a PIII-650 and 512 ram... I loaded it successfully onto a PII-233 with 64MB ram and it ran nice a smooth (with no other software istalled).

You may need to do a clean install and/or test some of your programs in older compatability modes.
 
It was a clean install. All the software is new, WinXP, Office XP, etc. IT has hundreds of machines to look after, I would think they know what they are doing. But to make things easy for themselves they only like Compaq, as it arrives out of the box. If you change anything they hate you. I can understand that--they don't want to pay a tech to trouble shoot a problem new hardware has caused. RRRRRRRR
 
I had the same problem.
Get latest bios update
totally whipe the hard drive, I used maxtor low level format. It depends on your hd it should be a maxtor.
make sure you using a original copy of xp and not a back up.
Then i stripped every thing out of it except the Nvidia video card and it installed without a hitch.
Some people just try and pop in Xp and think that when it formats that partition its gonna whipe everything but it dosent.
This worked for me im not sure it will work for you but its worth a try.
FYI the Compaq was my friends computer I was just helping out🙂
Good Luck
 
Originally posted by: RickH
Help!! I have a Presario PIII 650 with 512 MBs of memory that constantly locks up after our IT department installed Win XP. The claim it is too old (it's less that 2 years) to work with XP and that it was designed only for ME--note sticker on the front. I don't buy it. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft XP is not backwards compatible with a 2 year old machine. Is anyone running W2k or XP on this laptop?? Thanks..R
Click to expand...

yeah, you shouldn't buy their explanation, because it's bullsh|t. I have a Presario 1672 laptop (was K6-2 350MHz, now K6-2+ 450MHz w/ 192MB) (Win98 sticker BTW 😉)and I installed XP and it ran like a charm. For my laptop at least, everything is pretty standard parts (ESS audio, ATI video, Toshiba CD-ROM, SiS chipset, Synaptec touchpad, etc.) and there's no reason why this basic hardware shouldn't be supported by XP. It's ridiculous for your IT dept to claim that it's "too old" and therefore incompatible.
 
The problem is the $$$. They have spent hundreds of dollars paying an outside contractor to install XP and trouble shoot. It would be better to trash the machine and get a new one. Laptops are a pain. We have had to replace drives, motherboards, and displays on "almost new" Compaqs and Dell laptops. R.
 
I got XP Pro running on a Compaq 1247 laptop. Which is only a K6-2 400mhz, 160mb Ram, 4.3gig hdd. It runs nice after I turned off the fisher-price interface.
 
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