Are Compaq laptops shit?

[Vympel]

Im on a friends laptop at the moment, its a Compaq Presario C700, only a few weeks old, and its a bit rubbish - takes forever to start up and shut down, inconsistent restarts, its running Vista. I know nothing of laptops so has anyone got any experience?

[Dominus Atheos]

Compaqs are what HP brands it's lowest end models as so their shittyness doesn't tarnish their brand. So if it's a compaq, it's guaranteed to be a cheap piece of crap, becuase if it wasn't it would be branded HP. Unless it's a business model, since HP brands all it's business models as Compaqs regardless of price point.

[Dominus Atheos]

But the problems your friend is having probably isn't related to hardware. The most common issues people have with computers are usually due to the the software installed on the computer and how it's configured. If your friend wants a usable laptop, following this guide.

Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time

If the “Vista sucks” movement has a public face, it’s the Sony Vaio. No one knows that better than my new friend Jeremy Toeman. In May 2007, this 15-year Windows veteran replaced his old, beloved, XP-powered Vaio with a newer Vaio that came with Windows Vista Business installed. Practically overnight, he told me, his experience went from “awesome” to “awful.” The experience was so terrible, in fact, that after several months of struggling he finally surrendered, putting his $2500 Windows notebook in storage and replacing it with a MacBook last summer.

At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software. But is it really a hopeless case, or was this system done in by the rush to market and a sloppy OEM integration?

My instinct and experience says that even under these extreme circumstances, Windows Vista can be fixed. That’s why, for the past two months, Jeremy and I have been collaborating on an experiment. After he sent me his Vaio in early March, I blew away all traces of the old installation and set up a pristine copy of Windows Vista Business, with up-to-date drivers and zero crapware. (This screen shot, from the accompanying image gallery, shows the blizzard of dialog boxes and icons that are part of the original, unpleasant experience.) The initial results were eye-opening and impressive. After my makeover, this machine was every bit as fast as its specs said it should have been.

Out-of-box experience with a Sony Vaio and Windows Vista

Around the same time, Sony sent me a brand-new SZ770N Vaio, also with Windows Vista Business installed. The new model is in the same series as Jeremy’s machine, and physically nearly identical. Not surprisingly, the CPU and graphics processor in the newer unit were both significantly faster than last year’s model. Over the next two weeks, I played with both machines, switching between the original factory images and my own clean installs to see where the differences lay.

In this post and its accompanying image gallery, I’ll give you a close-up look at what I had to do to turn Sony’s messy, half-baked Windows installation into one that was worthy of their excellent hardware and that took full advantage of the new features in Vista. At the end of this post I’ll share some of the lessons I learned about how Sony and its rivals can win their customers back.

Meanwhile, both units have left my office - one returned to Sony, the other sent back to Jeremy in the Bay Area. So you don’t have to trust my observations about the differences in performance and overall experience. Over at his LIVEDigitally blog, Jeremy just posted his impressions (short version: ” At long last, after 11 months, Ed Bott has turned my $2500 Vaio laptop into a usable computer”), along with an accompanying video that is truly must-see TV. His advice to “the PC manufacturers who are failing to deliver consumer-ready products” is spot on.

With Jeremy’s machine, the overriding question was simple: Cleanup or clean install? Using the Sony recovery partition, I reinstalled the original factory image of Windows Vista from early 2007 and began fiddling with it. . It only took a few minutes to decide that cleaning up this mess would be much more troublesome than just starting over. Because I’ve done so many clean Vista installs in the past two or three years, the process wasn’t particularly difficult, but it had its share of frustrations and hassles.

Headache #1 would be a big hurdle for many people. Sony includes no installation media with its consumer systems, only a recovery partition. And when you use that option you get everything, with no way to say “Hold the crapware, please.” For a mere $28.95, I could have ordered a set of recovery DVDs from Sony, but I wasn’t interested in waiting, and I knew I had other options. I slipped a retail Windows Vista DVD (with SP1 already included) into the DVD drive, restarted the system, and kicked off a clean install. When the installer asked for a product key, I entered the one from the sticker on the bottom of the notebook (more on how that worked out in a few minutes).
Sony Recovery media

The installation itself was as fast and uncomplicated as I’ve come to expect from a Vista install. After the installation was complete, I restarted and let Windows Vista do its thing. Next, I updated hardware drivers and installed the Sony utilities I needed (a process I’ll discuss in more detail a little later). When all was said and done, I had a system that appeared to be working just fine. But a closer look revealed a few problems:

* Sony’s SmartWi network connection utility killed the wireless connection at every startup, without fail, forcing me to wait until the boot process had completed and then reconnect to the wireless access point manually. The solution? Disable the Scheduled Task that automatically starts SmartWi.
* Sleep and resume worked perfectly, with one exception. If I closed the notebook lid to sleep and then reopened the lid to resume, the display resolution changed to a distorted 1024×768 instead of the proper 1280×800. The culprit, it turned out, was a Vista feature called Transient Multimon Manager, which is too clever for its own good. When I disabled the other default scheduled task, this one supplied by Microsoft, the problem vanished, as did an annoying video glitch at startup.
* I used a Bluetooth mouse with this system, but it lost its connection (as did all other Bluetooth devices) after resuming from sleep. Updating the Toshiba Bluetooth driver to the most recent version solved this problem.
* The most recent Sony-approved display driver for the notebook’s Nvidia Go 7400 graphics subsystem was dated February 2007, but the driver itself showed a build date of December 2006. By Vista standards, this is downright ancient, and other Sony notebooks with the same graphics hardware have much more recent drivers. Sony’s support engineers eventually delivered a later driver to me, but I had already used a community-inspired hack to load an even more recent driver and decided to stick with it instead.

That’s the entire list of glitches I encountered. When I finished, every device had an up-to-date driver, and every system function worked as advertised, with no noticeable slowdowns. I used the system for a few days before deciding that it was safe to activate the clean install of Windows Vista. Because I had used the key from the sticker on the machine rather than the original OEM installation, activation over the Internet didn’t work. (That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. For details, see the “Royalty OEM” section this post.) I called the toll-free activation hotline, entered a bunch of numbers at the automated prompt, exchanged some pleasantries with a cheerful Microsoft employee on the other side of the world, and was fully activated in less than six minutes. Success!

For a clean install or a cleanup, drivers are key. That’s never been so true as now. A PC that was built a year ago is likely to have have been plagued with buggy drivers for video hardware, network adapters, and other crucial system components. Today, driver quality for Vista components across the board is noticeably better (although pockets of bugginess still exist). For a clean install, my challenge was to find the best driver for each system component, a strategy that required three separate search parties.

Phase 1, of course, was the assortment of drivers included as part of the default Windows installation and delivered as signed Optional updates through Windows Update. On Jeremy’s Vaio, the default install left only a small number of unsupported devices.

A clean install also exposed the strengths and weaknesses of Vista’s built-in troubleshooting tool, the Problem Reports and Solutions application. After completing a clean install, a full pass through the Important, Recommended, and Optional sections of Windows Update turned up a few additional drivers, including an update from Intel for the Wireless-N adapter.

Next stop was the Sony support website, which is a model of clarity and organization. Before selecting drivers, utilities, and other updates, I installed Sony’s Download Taxi program, a sharp little download helper that made the process easier than it otherwise might have been. I downloaded and installed all the drivers and utilities from the Original group (ignoring several compatibility warnings that turned out to be bogus) and then installed the relevant downloads from the Updates group. The installation went smoothly, with one noteworthy exception: installing the Sony Notebook Utilities seemed to go for an inordinately long time with no feedback, and I’m glad I didn’t get impatient and kill the process before it completed.

Sony’s Download Taxi

After all that, a pop-up balloon in the system tray told me that Vista had some solutions for problems that had been reported during installation. The five solutions it recommended were all signed drivers, three of which had not been delivered through Windows Update. By following the links, I found updated drivers for the UPEK’s TouchChip fingerprint reader, the Toshiba Bluetooth stack, the Texas Instruments FlashMedia reader, and some Sony components.

Those drivers made it possible to enable all the hardware that had been languishing in the Unknown Devices category in Device Manager and also enabled several components (such as the built-in webcam), but it still wasn’t good enough to get this system to peak performance. For that, I had to actively search for the best possible drivers. That was a particular challenge with the woefully outdated video drivers for the Nvidia Go 7400. Getting better performance required a trip to the forums at Notebook Review, downloading the Universal Extractor utility, and then a bit of tweaking to Sony’s Nvidia drivers for a different model. The installation was successful, but it’s certainly not a job for amateurs.

Any notebook he buys off the shelf may have problems just because most computer manufactures can't find their ballsacks with both hands, a roadmap, and one of those guys at airports that wave the lights around to tell the planes where to land. Or he can buy a Macbook, but he probably spent about $500 aussie dollars on this one and even the lowest end Macbooks cost 3 times as much.

[Anguirus]

I'm the farthest thing from a computer expert, but I've been using a Compaq (Presario R4000) laptop near-exclusively for over four years now without problems. It doesn't run any games that were made in the last five (ten?) years, but it has proven pretty darn reliable for internet-surfing and college work. It is heavy for a laptop, but I don't mind because my dumb ass has dropped it or dumped it off a desk several times with no problems.

[phongn]

In general, you can't choose on brand. Most major companies make laptops that run the gamut from "terrible" to "decent" (with a few making good ones).

[Beowulf]

Yeah, I've got an HP laptop too. Works wonderfully. I flattened the system and put a fresh install of Ultimate on. I did mine a bit differently than is listed in the guide, so I didn't have to make a call to MS. But that's the biggest problem with computers now: the system is loaded with too much crap for it to be fast.

[Sarevok]

Compaq Presario F558 user here. In my experience it is too slow to run any modern games and has poor battery life. On other hand it is light weight, has excellent keyboard, touchpad , a nice vivid 15 inch screen and is surprisingly rugged for a cheap laptop. On top of that it runs Vista Home Premium very smoothly despite mediocre AMD turion CPU and mere 1 GB RAM. I dunno about the higher end compaq laptops but the lower end models like mine seems to be good machines at low prices.

[General Zod]

The biggest thing about Compaqs I've noticed is pretty much everything about them feels cheap and nasty. I'll use an HP model without much trouble because they're generally a decent step up. But Compaq is one of the brands I'd refuse to buy unless I literally have no other choice given how much better notebooks there are out there for a comparable price.

[Stargate Nerd]

*long article*
Any notebook he buys off the shelf may have problems just because most computer manufactures can't find their ballsacks with both hands, a roadmap, and one of those guys at airports that wave the lights around to tell the planes where to land. Or he can buy a Macbook, but he probably spent about $500 aussie dollars on this one and even the lowest end Macbooks cost 3 times as much.

Hmm that's strange. I have a Sony Vaio laptop that I got back in April or May and although it's a Vista laptop it's running flawlessly. It's not an expensive model either, just a ~$850 one, that I got on sale for $700.

But then again I remember the guy at BestBuy telling me to stay away from Sony Vaios running Vista, so this must be a widespread problem

[Ryan Thunder]

*long article*
Any notebook he buys off the shelf may have problems just because most computer manufactures can't find their ballsacks with both hands, a roadmap, and one of those guys at airports that wave the lights around to tell the planes where to land. Or he can buy a Macbook, but he probably spent about $500 aussie dollars on this one and even the lowest end Macbooks cost 3 times as much.

Hmm that's strange. I have a Sony Vaio laptop that I got back in April or May and although it's a Vista laptop it's running flawlessly. It's not an expensive model either, just a ~$850 one, that I got on sale for $700.

But then again I remember the guy at BestBuy telling me to stay away from Sony Vaios running Vista, so this must be a widespread problem

Ditto. I got mine for $800 CDN. Mind, I've only had it for a couple days, but really, its quite functional.

A few glitches here and there due to a multi-lingual keyboard, though...

[White Haven]

The 'Compaq' label under HP's ownership is really a pretty schizophrenic title. It's used for servers, high-end workstations, and low-end laptops, the latter fraught with poor parts and design decisions on some models. I've never been able to figure out the logic of poisoning your 'high end and reliable business gear' name by moving out your cheap crap under the same label.