Ruff bought a Compaq Presario 5461. Bad Ruff, bad.

You see, before leaving the nest, Ruff wanted to leave his parents a basic computer they'd never have to worry about. Ruff wanted all of the parts to fall under a single warranty, and for the box never to have to be opened. So Ruff went to his electronics store and bought an affordable, simple system and an extended warranty.

The Compaq Presario 5461 seemed like a safe bet. Despite Compaq's questionable reputation, this system seemed nice an solid. It contained an AMD 500 mHz processor, an AGP video card, 64 megs of RAM, a CD burner, two USB ports (inconveniently mounted on the back of the unit), color coded connectors, a 10 gig hard drive, a spare 5.25 bay, and Windows 98: second edition. The price, $750, was very reasonable.

The Presario's keyboard contained a plethora of extra programmable shortcut buttons. The ones in front controlled the Internet. The top one connected to the Net and turned to the homepage, others turned on the e-mail program, others went to search engines, and shopping centers. They all, by default, were set to Compaq's own services, but could be reprogrammed by visiting the Presario website. An invasion of privacy, maybe, but at least not too inconvenient. Other buttons on the keyboard controlled the audio playback (play, pause, rewind, volume, etc.) and Ruff's favorite opened an e-mail form to contact Compaq tech support.

Ruff was eager to hand tech support duties to someone else.

So the system was installed, programs were added, a second CD-ROM drive was installed (to allow CD writing directly from one CD to another) and Ruff was happy that his parents would be able to run their word processing programs and surf the net easily.

But the Presario had other ideas. It locked up. Frequently. Inexplicably. It just shut down. Other times, it restarted itself. All by itself.

Ruff tried everything to fix it. There was no reason for it to behave this way. Ruff checked the power cord, and socket. Ruff even checked that the Presario's "On" button, which was made of less than sturdy plastic, was not jammed, as often happened.

Eventually, Ruff went to the store and got it replaced.

Ruff went home with the new system, and turned it on. Within an hour, the second computer was also locking up, and restarting, even without user input.

Ruff was mad.

Ruff went to the store on Christmas Eve and got his damn money back.

Now, Ruff can't speak for everyone else, and Ruff doesn't want to slander Compaq, but Ruff has vowed never to use a hydrant if there's a Presario around.

-
Ruff has since found out that all of Compaq's Presario systems had defective proprietary software loaded on start-up. The software overloaded the system memory on boot-up, causing it to reset itself. Ruff foams at the mouth thinking that Compaq never bothered to test its computers even once before releasing them. Just once!



Recommended: No