Frontpage Story #48

I am the network engineer (MCSE) for my company. We have approx 200 computers all running Win NT, with about 20 or so of them being Compaqs. I have had no end of trouble with these pieces of shit (the Compaqs, that is) , so when I found your page I felt compelled to write something. Firstly, as part of our standard Y2k compliance, we've been upgrading all our NT boxes to SP4 (or SP5). After upgrading from SP3 from SP4, the machines will give you a "Hard drive controller failure" every time you reboot the PC without switching off first.

The BIOS is unconventional, and you must have an 8-32 MB partition installed on your boot drive containing the "System Utilities" , in order to hit F10 to perform simple tasks such as changing the settings for the secondary IDE controller. Also, the BIOS is so slow - it takes ages to boot up. The motherboard and case are totally unconventional - the design is ridiculous, with a stupid daughterboard which allows you to have only two cards - either two PCIs, or two ISAs, or one of each.

You can't upgrade the motherboard because other motherboards won't fit the case, and you cant get another case, because it won't fit the motherboard. The CPU doesn't have a fan - it just has a stupidly large heatsink which is stuck to the chip and makes CPU upgrades troublesome.
The Hard drive is a Quantum Bigfoot, which must be one of the worst drives Quantum has ever made - a real clunker. I love Quantum drives generally, but these are BAD - I've had three of them fail catastrophically . All the screws in the PC are an unusual type - requiring a special screwdriver.
Now I know that these machines are quite old - they were left over from a few years ago before I started working there, but then a lot of the other old pentiums we have still don't have any problems and outperform the Compaqs convincingly.

Tonight, I am working on a Compaq 'Proliant' 800 server (not all our machines are old, btw) , which is another oldie which is utterly horrible to work with. It has all of its 5 drive bays used up - 2 SCSI drives, 1 TAPE drive, 1 CDROM, 1 FLOPPY. The previous engineer needed more storage space, so he added an external SCSI box with 2 SCSI drives configured as a mirror set - it was the only way, since the design of the case doesn't permit any more space for drives. (Some 'Server' !). Recently, one of these external SCSI drives failed, so I was called out to fix it up. I replaced the drive and re-etablished the mirror, but was still not convinced, so I decided to get an extra IDE drive and mount it internally as an extra backup - the idea was that I would set up an AT command to 'scopy' all the files from the mirror set to the IDE at 4 am each morning (in addition to the tape backup). I managed to drill holes in the bottom of the case, and mount the IDE drive on the floor of the!
server case where it would actually be quite close to the front cooling fan. So far, so good. But then I find out that no matter what I do, I can't activate the secondary IDE controller. Compaq's 'system utilities' just won't let me do it! A single IDE cable is not long enough to reach both the CDROM and IDE HDD - it must be one or the other. I could probably disable the CDROM - it only needs to be used by administrators and doesn't get used very often, but fuck it, why should I? On any other system, adding a drive to the secondary IDE channel is a common and trivial procedure.
Its 1:45 in the morning and I'm utterly pissed off with this piece of crap - I've been working on this problem for about 9 hours straight now, and I'm at the end of my tether. From Compaq's site, Iv'e downloaded firmare upgrades which don't work, system utilities which are frustrating and useless, and so-called technical docs which have no real substance and don't tell you anything you don't already know.

And one more thing, the front of the server doesn't appear to have any kind of dust filter in front of the cooling fan, which explains why everything inside the case had about half an inch of dust on it.
Unfortunately, I have 'inherited' these horrible monsters. There is no way I would willingly buy one of these machines. They are appalling.