A
Al Smith
The technician had me twist, grab, wiggle, move, remove and reinsert
[much snipped]
I enjoyed your long and entertaining post, especially since the
same thing happened to me when I bought my first computer on-line.
It was a Dell, and when I opened the box and plugged it in,
nothing happened. Turned out it was a poorly seated stick of RAM
-- the exact same problem you had.
To be fair, you can't blame Compaq too much since they are
probably as good with support as anybody else -- which is to say,
lousy. You either need someone who knows about computers near you
to help you solve the problems that crop up, or you need to learn
about computers enough to solve these problems yourself.
You really didn't need to send the computer in for service over a
bad stick of RAM. You could have run a RAM memory tester and
discovered the problem yourself, and should have suspected it when
reseating the RAM stick cured your initial boot-up difficulty,
then the same problem cropped up again.
After the service folks screwed up your software, you could have
reinstalled everything yourself, if you'd known how to do this,
and it isn't all that difficult. Everybody should know how to
reformat and reinstall, since they are going to need to do it
sooner or later -- probably sooner.
The only thing wrong with Compaqs is that they have proprietary
motherboards and power supplies. This makes them difficult to
upgrade. Also, they don't give you all the original operating
system and program CDs that you need to do a complete reinstall.
Other than that, their computers are well made and reliable, for
the most part.
[much snipped]
I enjoyed your long and entertaining post, especially since the
same thing happened to me when I bought my first computer on-line.
It was a Dell, and when I opened the box and plugged it in,
nothing happened. Turned out it was a poorly seated stick of RAM
-- the exact same problem you had.
To be fair, you can't blame Compaq too much since they are
probably as good with support as anybody else -- which is to say,
lousy. You either need someone who knows about computers near you
to help you solve the problems that crop up, or you need to learn
about computers enough to solve these problems yourself.
You really didn't need to send the computer in for service over a
bad stick of RAM. You could have run a RAM memory tester and
discovered the problem yourself, and should have suspected it when
reseating the RAM stick cured your initial boot-up difficulty,
then the same problem cropped up again.
After the service folks screwed up your software, you could have
reinstalled everything yourself, if you'd known how to do this,
and it isn't all that difficult. Everybody should know how to
reformat and reinstall, since they are going to need to do it
sooner or later -- probably sooner.
The only thing wrong with Compaqs is that they have proprietary
motherboards and power supplies. This makes them difficult to
upgrade. Also, they don't give you all the original operating
system and program CDs that you need to do a complete reinstall.
Other than that, their computers are well made and reliable, for
the most part.
