HP repair

[Jarhed7276]

Hi all,

I have a few questions about repairing an HP. I know the memory is proprietary but what about the other parts? Can you put in any brand of hd,ps, etc?
Would there be any problems with partitioning and reformatting the hd and installing a retail version of XP?

Thanks,
Gerry

[Rand Dusing]

Can you tell us the model number and other specs?

The RAM is not proprietary.
The HDD, CD-ROMS, PCI, AGP, ISA things to that effect are not proprietary.
The connectors for PSU's, and the layout of the mobo could be proprietary. They've done away with that. Gateway is the only mfr that still does it nowadays.

[John Prophet]

I doubt even the memory is proprietary. The PSU is probably just a "micro atx" sized supply...which are usually underpowered but now you can get decent replacements, like this one


"Would there be any problems with partitioning and reformatting the hd and installing a retail version of XP?"

no, there shouldnt be any problem at all.

[Jarhed7276]

No, unfortunately, at the moment I don't have the pc. It belongs to my nephew. I am going to pick it up later this evening. All I know at the moment is it has a Celeron 700 and 128 meg ram. He is getting error messages when trying to install software.

[John Prophet]

Well the RAM can definitely be upgraded....hard to say about the cpu etc.....some of them will allow the use of P3 cpu's...but some wont....when you find out the model number we can look it up and see whats up with it.

If you want to put XP on it you DEFINITELY want more memory.

[DoctorReno]

The specs will reveal more but I have yet to see a HP that 3rd party components and memory didn't work fine. I also don't see where you would have any problems installing XPprovided the CPU is relatively fast, the HD large enough and you have enough memory.

I used to like HP a lot but I have recently seen a lot of the Pavillions and the MoBo's are Trigem E-Machine MoBo's and IMO not the previous high quality associated with HP.

[John Prophet]

with this one being a 700m celly..I bet its an ASUS motherboard....like an cuw-am for instance. (I think thats the right one, lol)

[Jarhed7276]

Well cool. I thought the ram (and most everything else) was proprietary on all HPs. I would have got him some ram for X-mas if I had known that.
I'll get it over here tonight and check it out. I'll post back with the results.

Thanks,
Gerry

[DoctorReno]

XP will run ok with a 700 mhz CPU. It will run with 128 megs of RAM but you will want minimally 256 megs and preferably 512. If at all possible go for the 512.
How big is the HD? FYI, XP alone will take up just under 2Gb and then you will start installing your applications so bigger is better. Of course you can always install a second HD.