Them thar slots are useless, son....
Mar 02 '00
My wife thought it was a great deal. There was room on the Sears card. It *was* considerably more computer than the 486DX-100 I was getting by on.
But I'm sorry we bought it.
I think computers are one of the few areas where a brand name is a positive detriment. I've helped a friend with a Packard Bell computers; when a power supply went out, she couldn't buy a new case, complete with power supply for $35, because the motherboard wouldn't fit. She had to pay $200 for a *reconditioned* power supply.
And that curved face on my son's Acer computer sure looked sexy until the CD-ROM drive decided to go south. You couldn't stick a standard CD-ROM drive in there - even an Acer CD-ROM drive. Because of the curved faceplate, it had to be special-ordered.
And the delay in getting these special-order parts is probably more of a pain than the extra expense.
So when my wife decided she *had* to have this HP machine, I looked it over. It *will* take a standard CD-ROM drive. There's nothing funny about the spare bay. There are open slots - not a lot, but enough that there was room for the network card I'd need.
Except after hours of trying to get a standard NE-1000 PCI network card to work - and buying a second NE-1000 PCI network card from a different manufacturer, I still couldn't get the network card to work. I could *see* the other computer in Network Neighborhood, but when I clicked on the other puter's icon, Windows politely told me that I was spelling the name wrong. Nice trick, that spelling the name wrong.
Hewlett-Packard's response? Unless I bought the network card from them, they wouldn't help me get it working - but HP doesn't *sell* network cards for desktop puters, only PCMCIA network cards for laptops.
I spent the $35 to have Microsoft try to help me with the problem. They ended up giving up, after trying diligently for hours to troubleshoot the problem, and gave me a copy of Win98SE in the hope that it was a bug that the newer version of Win98 had fixed. It didn't, but now I have a copy of all the Win98 stuff that Hewlett-Packard omitted when they shipped the machine. And if you do a system reinstall with the HP disks, it always completely reformats the hard drive (destroying whatever data you might have there) even when you choose the option that says it won't.
Finally, I purchased a *third* network card. An old Tulip card, from DEC (Digital Equipment is now part of Compaq.) The Tulip card *is* compatible with the HP. Nothing wrong with the NE-1000 cards - they are now working nicely in some no-name hardware clones belonging to friends - but this Hewlett-Packard is incompatible with the most popular Ethernet card ever made.
If you never have to reinstall Windows98 (yeah, sure!), and you don't want the extra stuff on the Windows98 disk, and you never add anything to the HP, and you don't mind your computer being out of service for days or weeks waiting for overpriced replacement parts, perhaps it is a good deal to buy a name brand computer like the Hewlett-Packard Pavilian 4455. Within very constrained limits, it *is* a serviceable computer.
But if you think you're getting a computer that can grow with you because of the slots, or you think you are getting a reliable computer simply because Hewlett-Packard made premium-grade instruments for decades, think again.
The next computer will be a hardware clone, no matter *how* appealing the Sears ad looks.
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Epinions.com ID:
deaconb
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