Really Concerned About Upgrading HP Pavilion to XP Pro

[notreallyme]

Let's see: I have a new HP that came installed with XP Home. I copied the
7 disks as supported onto CD, I even ordered the 7 disks at no charge. I
upgraded the OS to XP Pro with no problems. I opened the case and found
plenty of room for upgrades. I added a 2nd hard drive, a DVD drive, added
more memory without having to ask "what kind?", installed another video card
and have not had a problem. Cheap parts? I don't think so. It came with a
WD hard drive, and an ASUS board sold at most computer parts stores.
Quiet? You bet! Oh yeah! I repair computers. They are all crap off the
shelf at those prices. Dell and Sony have the same problems HP/Compaq have
had. Biggest problem: the owner.

 

[Ben Myers]

1. Quality is in the eye of the beholder.
2. Agreed. The problem is often the owner. Buying on the cheap, expecting a
Mercedes at junk car prices... Ben

 

[Nels]

I know this is an old thread, but just to add my own experience with an
HP upgrade to XP Pro for someone in the future who may access this
archive (like I just did)--

I have an HP Pavilion XE783 which originally came with Win ME, 64M RAM,
30 Gig HD, and 700 Mhz processor (Celeron, I believe). I am using this
machine to type this reply. Six months ago I upgraded this machine as
follows:

512 Mb RAM from Crucial.com (two 256 Mb cards)
Phoenix BIOS 5.1 from eSupport.com
Win XP Pro
SP2 upgrade for the XP Pro

No one in this thread has said anything about upgrading the BIOS
(unless I missed it). The BIOS needed to be changed before my machine
would accept the XP Pro install. Formatting the HD and upgrading the
BIOS removed most of the HP bugaboos, and the new install went without
a hitch. No driver problems except it balked a bit when I tried to
load my old (ancient) visioneer 3100 scanner (I bought this with an old
Win 95 machine). However, I was even able to fool the machine into
working with that too. Crucial and eSupport matched their products to
my machine after I supplied them with the model number. The machine
runs fast and works well now. I am far from a computer guru, but
upgrades are available for most anything on the market. For the last 6
months since this upgrade this machine has been working smoother than I
can remember when I bought it new.