| Front Page Story | |
| Author: Mat | |
| Email: squidboy@revolitonist.com |
|
| A couple of years ago i bought a preario
cds770 from a friend for next to nothing. This is what keeps me from feeling ripped off.
So the deal with this POS is that it's a 75mhz pentium class with 8mb ram and a 720mb hdd,
out of the box. I stuck some free partss in the sucker, (4 8mb edo simms, a p120 chip.
3.5gb hdd, etc) and set the whole damn thing up so that it worked pretty well, if not
reliably. This was great untill about a week ago when i decided to replace the CMOS
battery as dirrected by the upgrade/maintainance manual. I suppose that my first clue that
something was wrong is that the supposedly replacable part was soldered into the board,
and not clipped as it should have been, but like a fool i carefully replaced the
battery... but of course by the time that the new one was in, the CMOS had reverted to the
factory default state... after i had set the thing up with the 2nd onboard eide controller
enabled to accomodate other drives and the paralell port adjusted to work in accordance.
Now when it boots up, the paralell port and the cdrom drive conflict and either one or the other works, but not both. Here's the punchline... i had fdisked the 720mb drive and swapped it out to another machine which is running linux very well off of it, and replaced it with the other drive simply ages ago, and the only way to get into the damn CMOS setup utility is... via the drive. yay. Of course the website is useless, although i got a "softpaq" that hopefully will act as a floppy driven CMOS utility, but i have severe doubts... we will see... i really hope they don't make their alpha's like this... death to compaq |
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