Friday, August 31, 2007

pulling my hair out

About three days of pulling my hair out I am giving in and just realizing there is a hardware major malfunction in the design of the Compaq F500. The WiFi drivers were upgraded with what I hope was the correct ones as Compaq does not even list the F500 on there Web page. (I'd try to get out of it too!) It came with a total mess of trial (share ware) loaded on it and after removing all of it the best I could, Icons and bits and pieces remained scattered about the registry. A reg cleaner was used and this made other problems appear. After the restore for about the 3rd time I just loaded a virgin copy of Vista. This seemed to do the best fix so far, but the WiFi is still slow connecting if at all. Sometimes you must re-boot 3 times to get it to see the network. I did find if you hard wire it to the router with CAT-5 it works without a flaw. So if you do not have a wireless access point or wireless router you would fair very well with this computer. I wanted to up the RAM from 1 Gig to 2 Gig but found the machine only has two slots and they are filled with 2 separate 512K boards. This means you would have to remove and discard them replacing them with 2 one Gig cards (strips) at a cost of over $280.00. This is half the cost of the machine, therefor, out of the question. Alot of my little ad on programs that I have come to use everyday will not run under the Vista OS. The file system is very hard to look at, and I could keep going on but you have heard many times before about the quirks of Vista, believe me they are true. I did some research on loading XP on this machine and found there was a driver nightmare. Sound, video, nic, and probable much more. You must stick with Vista, Bill has gotcha again. To end, I have done all I can do, I am just going to try to live with it. It seems I have took a step back instead of forward by getting a newer computer. It's for sale at a discount price.