I had an old Hewlett Packard laying around and tried a HD swap out. Everything was fine but the video drivers. I got a choice between 2 or 16 colors LOL. The HP box had XP in it but loaded with Trojans. The system was given to me and I can't access the Control panel or anything except the basics. It also has a second system boot Whistler XP home edition {going on memory sorry} that I think is the virus re-write and has system control. I swapped them back till I decide what to do with my old Compaq next. I disabled the modem on the Hewlett Packard and let the grandkids play games on it. I told them don't copy anything from it LOL. It works good enough for that. If I had the original disk I would just reformat it. My cousin who gave it to me had put Blubster in it and ran it without any virus protection whatsoever. He gave me three and only the one without Blubster was virus free. The bad news was it has W/M.E. the only one I've ever actually seen function right LOL.
I'm not a techie by a long shot but I do most of my own repair work though. When I get too frustrated I scrap them for parts :>} The one I do not attempt to work on is the Laptop. I bought it last summer from Dell and an extended service plan/warranty to go with it for that reason. It's my dream machine with most of what I wanted put in it including XP instead of VISTA.
One of the junkers I have is gonna get Linux pretty soon when I get enough time to do it. If Microsoft can't do better than VISTA then when XP dies I'll go elsewhere. I don't get it though XP is the most reliable and stable system MS built. Why the change? I tried VISTA on a display at a store and swore I would never buy it.
I’m not sure either. I have an old Gateway that a friend gave me a year or so back, with an on-board ATI Rage 128 chip. He was sharp enough to have kept all his discs, though, so I have everything needed for the “stock” setup. A week ago, though, his employee brought me a couple of old machines that someone from his church gave him, and he wanted to see if one could be made workable. Turns out it couldn’t be, but I salvaged a few odd pieces, a 4 port USB card, an Ethernet card, a Philips 24x CD burner and two sticks of 128 RAM, which went in the Gateway. Oh, and the burner had an “Age of Empires 2” game in the drawer.
Dangdest thing I’ve ever seen – one of the hulks had two hard drives, a 10 gig that was “dead”. Couldn’t FDISK it. The other was a 160 gig, and I put it in the working Gateway and the computer itself wouldn’t even power up! I put it in my usual machine, and it wouldn’t power up either. Absolutely dead, as if the power cord was pulled. The power supply in the old hulk had something rattling in it, which turned out to be a couple of blown capacitors. My best layman’s guess is that the power supply blew on its own, or via a lightning strike, and the hard drives absorbed the hit, and the power connections on that drive somehow got fused in reverse. (?) So don’t rule out a defective hard drive if the whole machine seems dead.
I managed to find the drivers for the two cards with not too much trouble, but it might just have easily been the opposite, some sites being cryptic. (Dell is one).
I have a couple of HP’s, running ME. The employee of my friend mentioned earlier gave me an old HP that I was lucky enough that both were shipped with the exact same software build number. Both were built in early ’01, so MAYbe I could help you with a driver or two, maybe not, depending on how much newer yours is. If you like, tell me the model number and I’ll look the specs up.
That Gateway is only a 400 mhz, and came from the factory with Windows 98 and 64 whopping megs of RAM, but now it finally has 256, so will likely use it as a Linux training ground.
I personally like ME. Over time I’ve found what works and what doesn’t, have removed all the extraneous stuff and gotten the startup list to fighting trim, and am not a major gamer, so it’s very very rare to see a blue screen. (My kind of games are old arcade ones from the late ‘70’s to early ‘80’s).
I’d be scared to open up a laptop myself. I looked over an HP one for a friend’s customer, and found the service manual for it, and the blowup diagram for changing the CD drive was enough for me. I could do it, but when it’s someone elses machine….