My mother-in-law, thinking that she was buying a good brand name, bought a Compaq 5835 last year to run her home tax business off of. Some of the problems this machine has are: modem disconnects frequently, multiple system errors and crashes, a Compaq "restore" disk which apparently does not work as it should, system frequently does not recognize hard drive installed in system forcing multiple reboots, flaky performance with factory installed components such as the re-writable drives and more!

My mother-in-law has hated her Compaq so much since she bought it last year that after tech service REFUSED to honor the onsite warranty, she verbally threatened them by telling them she would post newsgroup warnings regarding Compaq and their lousy customer service. After that, they reluctantly sent somebody out to work on it. (Not even a Compaq employee, but a contracted local "certified" technician) All that he did was replace components that they (Compaq tech) _thought_ might be the root cause and he didn't even troubleshoot! (He said he was not allowed?!) Not only that, he forgot to plug the case fan back in!! Luckily, I know a bit about IT myself and I caught that when I looked inside to see what he had done.

Anyway, the problems still persisted and after they refused to honor the warranty any further, she took it to a guy who builds custom computers and bought all new nonCompaq-branded parts except that she reused the hard drive, memory, and cd/cd-rw drives from the compaq. Get this: She _still_ has problems. I believe that one of the root problems is the Hard Drive from the Compaq. Some clusters in the drive show bad when you run system defragmentation, which leads me to believe they bought rejected parts from manufacturers? Other companies such as Packard Bell have been known to do that in the past. This is only speculation, though.

Anyway, she has gotten so spiteful of her Compaq that she gifted the remaining parts (case, modem, motherboard, and CPU)to me to do whatever I please with (If I can even get them to work reliably) and she has ordered and already received her new Dell Pentium 4 computer so that she has a reliable computer to run her home business off of this year. Stay away from Compaq, people!!



Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): unknown
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Celeron
Processor speed: 501-600
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-RW
Hard Drive (GB): 7-9