Ben Myerswrote:
What? Either I do not understand what is stated here, or ????

What is "Compaq locked"? Please explain this unique phrase.

"You can't even get Compaq drivers to work if the component isn't in
a Compaq."

The Compaq drivers are little more than repackaged commodity
drivers.



I beg to differ, have you ever downloaded a Compaq driver from their
web site? for something as silly as a modem card, then tried to
install that driver on a separate machine? It ain't gonna happen.
They don't even come as drivers, they come as "ComPacks." I've tried
this numerious times, in the time frame you mention and much later;
and have never had success. This is obviously a Compaq custom bios
question more then anything else.

Try it, try it today. Take a component out of a Compaq, put it in
your computer, go to the Compaq site and see if you can get the
driver for it to work. It'll say; "this Compaq (whatever) can only
be installed on a Compaq computer. Good Luck... So, you're out a
modem card that you paid for! Forget the computer it came in. It's
just like Windows itself. The drivers are only at the Compaq site or
in the Compaq restore CD; which naturally, won't install on anything
other then the exact machine it came off of.

I found a Toshiba Laptop, that broke and Toshiba fixed, that wouldn't
accept it's restore disk; because Toshiba fixed it with something
probably better, but was not on that disk. This is quite common,
where have you been?

You have to go to the original vendors site and hope. That's if you
can figure out who the vendor is. That's Compaq locked. That's
Proprietary and that's why you don't want to buy a store bought
computer period! I don't care what it is...

The average consumer is much better served by their local white box
shop. They have the highest customer satasfaction ratings for a
reason.

You get all your disks, you have no crap to weed out, and you have
someone right down the street who built it. Like Duh???

And, a totally compatable computer to whatever you want to do with it.