Having just read all the posts between two Compaq threads, I figure I might as well contribute my take on them:
For a non-technical user, Compaq is no worse than any other major brand. Price-for-pound, they do pretty well.
For us technicians, both as owners (a former coworker and good friend) and as the guys who see a lot of out-of-warranty Compaq, they can be nightmares.
My friend struggled with his Presario for more than a year before retiring it and buying a Gateway (he'd have built his own, but his wife wanted the warranty). The computer was less than three years old, had had four parts replaced under warranty, and then I'd diagnosed bad RAM and a bad HDD after warranty, and it had the flakiest chipset I've ever seen.
As a tech, I don't like working on Compaqs. They're a pain to upgrade or repair. Generic floppy drives sometimes have to be "modified" with a good pair of needlenose pliars and a screwdriver to make them work behind that lovely curving facing. Compaq wanted $60 for their floppy, I paid $15 for that generic. A blown power supply usually results in a new case, as Compaq (as of a year ago) wanted more for their crappy PS ($90) than I paid for a case with a Deer 250W ($50). I've yet to see a Presario with an AGP port, though it's been about 6 months since I was doing services like that. Poor cooling solutions resulted in more than one toasted K6-2 back in the olden days. And so on, and so on, and so on...
In short, Compaq makes a decent product, so long as it works. If it doesn't work, pray that you're still under warranty.
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| WILL WORK FOR HARDWARE |
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