Other people's opinions on Compaq are invited.
Foget it. Not the opinions, but Compaq. We are punished by the same Corpoare decision: Compaq only. They are reliable though, but in the old '386 days, were everybody used SIMs they used *special* memory modules, usuably at quadrupple prices. Later, they switched to PS2 modules, well can't argue about that. The floppy drives in these days were different and special too. If you wanted to add a second hard drive, too bad (valid up to now). You needed special (ring ring more dollars into compaqs account) adaptors to mount them. I am currently saving old (from binned 386's) 3 1/2" drives, or rather the plates they are mounted on, since these make nice mounting plates for a second harddrive (Deskpro 590). Some genial chap at compaq discovered that HD cables with one HD connector are cheaper, and since there is no place to mount a second hard drive... I remember nice adventures with cables that had one pin "missing" to avoid misplacement, but were differently coded. I couldn't recycle a cable from an elder PC. And there are these sort of rails that you'll need to mount i.e. CD ROMs into the 590's (same applies probably for the deskpro 4000 series too). Again, old 386's and 486's were butchered to salvage these from old 5 1/4" drives. Another semi moron got through with the idea of placing the setup onto the hard drive into an extra partition. very nice that you can have a french or german version, but I'd prefer an english (for goodness sake, even french or italian) version that is always reacheable from ROM. Not to mention the infamous "Compaq Q-Vision" screen display card, that is found in the 486 i-series and deskpro 5xx series, beeing on top of the the linux unsupported list for ages. Best of all, its easy to upgrade a normal PC. Try to find a board that will fit into a compaq and work.... We still stay with compaq for reasons that are plausible, but these reason were still plasible it you replace the name compaq with anything else. stay away with compaq! Juergen (Sorry to those Compaq subscribers for this list, I had to air my frustration) -- =========================================== __ _ Juergen Braukmann juergen.braukmann@gmx.de| -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Tel: 0201-743648 dk4jb@db0qs.#nrw.deu.eu | /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ===========================================_\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/