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2018-05-16
1/5
Seems like planned obsolescence or sabotage
"I was just working on a Presario SR1911X and the amount of bs was unbelievable.
I was missing the original install cd so I had some issues. First off, HP/Compaq doesn't even have archived drivers available on their site. I was lucky to find ANY drivers for it by looking on 3rd party sites. I understand not giving active support to old products anymore but they could at least keep their old drivers up!
I was initially trying to install Win XP Pro. I did not care about security of using an old OS. This was to be an old gaming computer for playing old PC games from pre-2004. I was going to have it offline in general use.
XP had absolutely NO drivers for this Compaq, either out of the box or online. The drivers I did find rarely installed correctly, usually failing the install and needing to be installed manually.
The main reason for this bad review is the sound driver. I could not get the onboard sound working at all. The realtek audio driver would not install without a Microsoft UAA driver. I got the UAA driver, which would install but wouldn't actually do anything. No driver added to Device Manager, no changes in hardware, and the realtek driver would still say the same error message. So I disabled the onboard sound in BIOS and did a fresh install to get rid of conflicts, and tried a Soundblaster card. Same thing, driver WOULD NOT INSTALL. It would but wouldn't enable the device at all, though it could be seen in Device Manager. I figured the problem was XP, so I tried to install Vista, and then 7, in the same way. First with onboard, when it wouldn't work, disabled it and fresh install trying the Soundblaster. I also tried different Soundblaster cards in case 1 was bad. NOTHING WORKED. Its like the computer was designed to have an audio driver conflict in hardware, and the only workaround was engineered by them, having to use the original install CD. When I got the computer, the onboard sound worked on the XP install it had, and it looked like it came from the original CD (it had a weird 3rd party UI). I can understand requiring the original CD to use the onboard sound, but the driver should still be made available online. Otherwise its just being made difficult to force people to upgrade, since losing an install CD is so common. The ASININE part in all this, is that outside of the issues with the onboard, 3rd party soundcards should work. It seems like sabotage from Compaq that they designed it where they wouldn't! Disable onboard so no conflicts, fresh install with 7, a 3rd party soundcard should work. This is some shadiness on part of Compaq."
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