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Mark Thompson observed:
>I don;t know about that but I just recently bought a Compaq Presario and it
>was a total lemon! ... I would NEVER buy another Compaq and I
>suggest that you look hard and long before doing so yourself.
Let me echo that. If you go down to alt.sys.pc-clones.compaq, you'll find
a whole lot of people who aren't particularly happy with their machines.
I'm writing this on a Presario 1621 laptop that's now about a year old.
I've had to scrub the hard drive down to bare platters three times now
in order to get rid of bombs, which become more and more frequent
as time passes. Last time I finished the RESTORE, installed WinWord,
and had it freeze solid before even shutting it down for the first time.
This would be less annoying, but there's no hardware reset, and the
RESTORE utility both destroys all your files and permits no options
about what gets reinstalled. What malfunctioned last time is exactly
what you get this time. The folks at the Compaq newsgroup think
the problem is with Compaq's TSRs, which are buggy. Far be it from
me to disagree.
As for the hardware, I got this back about two weeks ago after having
the touchpad and keyboard replaced. (Touchpad was the worst of it;
uncooperative left mouse-equivalent button.) The new touchpad is
fine so far, but the keyboard skips characters unless I really pound the
keys. It won't surprise me if it winds up going back again. Depends
on how patient I am and how desperately I can't do without it in the
next few weeks.
For whatever it's worth, a technician I ran into says the Armada series
is much more reliable than the Presarios. Not that that's saying much.
I've used a lot of machines at this point--bought my first in 1979--and
this is the buggiest I've used to date.
Owen Davies
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