Quality No Longer A Concern At Compaq
Jan 31 '01
The Bottom Line Compaq has lost all sense of quality and integrity. Skip it and keep on looking.
There was a time, not too many years ago, when Compaq manufactured a decent, reliable computer. Now it would seem that the company no longer considers quality to be an issue.
As a hobby, I troubleshoot and repair PCs for friends and neighbors, and recently a friend brought his Compaq Presario to me for repair, thinking that it merely had some kind of software "glitch". But the machine wouldn't even boot up, and after some diagnostics I found the hard drive to be defective. Luckily for my friend, his machine still had a week left under warranty, and so he had Compaq replace the hard drive. Exactly eight days later (no warranty now, by ONE day)the machine again had major problems, sometimes booting, sometimes not, and crashing every time he tried to get on the internet. After taking a look inside, I saw that the IDE cable had burned, and that the modem that Compaq had installed was one of the extremely "cheap" variety; the type that has no on-board processor of its own and therefore must tap into the main processor to run. I replaced the IDE cable, got him a new internal modem, and he was up and running again.
While looking inside his machine, my mouth dropped to the floor from surprise at the low-grade, cheap components that had been used. The motherboard was a tiny quarter-board, with an AMD processor (they couldn't spring for an Intel or at least a Cyrix processor??), a no-name, probably made by some forgotten people in the Andes video card with only 2 megs of memory, and uncertified drivers for everything and anything.
The front panel of the outer case was made of such cheap plastic that two of the buttons eventually broke off, and I had a devil of a time finding replacements.
It seems that our choice of well-made computers is slowly being whittled down to nothing, as Compaq joins the infamous lineup that includes Packard Bell and Acer.
Perhaps our best bet now is to have our PCs custom-built from scratch by local shops rather than be at the mercy of companies who regard their bottom line as being more important than their reputation.
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Epinions.com ID:
ClaireKS
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Member: Claire (Nickname: LadyWolf)
Location: Northern Virginia
Reviews written: 62
Trusted by: 80 members
About Me:
Avid nature conservationist and friend to all living things.
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