Frontpage Story #54

I work as a techie in an authorized Compaq dealer. I've been selling presarios for over a year now, and I've found the systems to be okay for the customer who DOESN'T intent to upgrade anything on it. I've fought and bled with they're terrible cases.. struggled with the crappy softpaqs.. and believe it or not, there wasn't anything I couldn't solve.. not until this happened:

I was in a recent situation where my boss asked my to install a cd writer for a customer who wanted to buy it with a complete system package. "No problem" I've managed to install various other things over the past year in Compaqs, I figured it was no biggie. The compaq 5360 lists in its specs that it has "Two drive bays open for expansion" which is even clearly stated on the system's homepage http://www.compaq.com/athome/desktops/5360/dq.html (go see for yourself)

I open up the case to do the work, and what do I see sitting in the "free" drive bay under the CDROM drive? the mega-clunker Quantum Bigfoot. WTF? So where the expandibility?.. My boss, trying to keep the sale closed, tells me to move the hard drive to the bottom of the case (blocking the only ISA), and to stick it with double sided tape. I strongly suggested against this unconventional upgrade. But he insisted. I take out the hard drive.. stick the clunker to the bottom and install the cd-r as planned. Everything is fine! I had both drives detected in windows.. no prob.. BUT the ide controller on the motherboard is totally messed. It gets confused as to which drive is which and the computer crashes each time you install something thats on cd. I even tried all the different CS SL MA possiblities and nothing changed. Expandable and Upgradable MY ASS!

A frustrated Sales Rep

Front Page Story
Author: sales rep
Email: deebo@skinz.dyndns.org