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.

Nightmare marches on

I just bout a a new Compaq notebook with Vista Home Premium, It has an AMD dual core proceser that runs at 1.7 Ghz. It has 1 Gig of memory. By the specks it should be a rocket compared to my old HP 4900, but its not. Why ? I'm trying to figure it out. Vista is somewhat the same as far as the user is concerned but the file system and deep down in the guts is much different. It is going to take some time to understand just what Bill was thinking about when he coded Vista. I find the built in wireless (WiFi) works much poorer and takes a lot of head scratching to connect. I find that it takes as long as five minutes to connect to my network from a cold boot-up even after it was configured to it. I'm going to put another 1 Gig. of memory in it and see if this helps to speed up the process. I do like the wide screen and light weight and the touch pad is very smooth. It took me 4 hours to un-install all the junk & trial ware that came installed on it. I crashed the OS completely in the process but I restored it from the 2 DVD disks I made then repeated the un-install process without a problem the 2nd time. Most all the big computer sales companies are too cheap now to provide the Windows OS on CD or DVDs. I bet it saves them at least 50 cents per machine. Make sure you burn the OS to dvd after you buy a new machine, believe me you're going to need them. I'm going to try a few things on this computer to get it going to the way I think it should be running. I'll keep you posted as the nightmare marches on...........jackDemaree.