Compaq Tech Support
Aug. 2nd, 2004 12:22 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
boredevilperson.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
techrecoveryInteresting. Mid last week my sister in law called me to say they were having problems with my brother's computer (a year and a half old Compaq) It kept running slowly and shutting down.
She already figured it was Windows XP getting bogged down with Internet crap so she backed up the important stuff and tried to do a restore. The restore disc was not working.
So she calls Compaq Tech support and they send her out a new set of restore CDs. Starts a restore again, same thing. She managed to get it to a point where Windows would at least come up but it was still running very slowly and shutting down.
From what she said it sounds like Compaq didn't do much troubleshooting and told her that a fan must have gone bad so it's overheating and she'll need to take it to a service center. She wasn't left with a good feeling after dealing with these people. Plus she didn't want to take it to a service center.
So she called me up to see if I could take a look. I got out there yesterday and started it up. Yup very slow and just doesn't seem to want to work well.
I restarted it and went into system setup looking for Diagnostics. I stumbled on a Hard Drive diagnostic utility built into the BIOS. Was actually thinking this might be a memory issue but I figured "Why not" So I run it. "This will take 50 minutes to run" about a minute into it the message said "Hard drive needs replacement"
So we run to Circuit City, buy a Western Digital (those are still good right?) and replace the Maxtor drive with that. Computer restores fine and is back to normal.
I'm just surprised that Compaq tech support didn't have her run any diagnostic utilities on the system to determine the problem. Particularly when it's built into the BIOS. Then again, maybe I'm not surprised. I guess it's not a huge deal because the service center would've determined the cause and fixed it (for a fee) but still. Just seems that they didn't try at all on this one. I could be wrong though!
Oh well.
She already figured it was Windows XP getting bogged down with Internet crap so she backed up the important stuff and tried to do a restore. The restore disc was not working.
So she calls Compaq Tech support and they send her out a new set of restore CDs. Starts a restore again, same thing. She managed to get it to a point where Windows would at least come up but it was still running very slowly and shutting down.
From what she said it sounds like Compaq didn't do much troubleshooting and told her that a fan must have gone bad so it's overheating and she'll need to take it to a service center. She wasn't left with a good feeling after dealing with these people. Plus she didn't want to take it to a service center.
So she called me up to see if I could take a look. I got out there yesterday and started it up. Yup very slow and just doesn't seem to want to work well.
I restarted it and went into system setup looking for Diagnostics. I stumbled on a Hard Drive diagnostic utility built into the BIOS. Was actually thinking this might be a memory issue but I figured "Why not" So I run it. "This will take 50 minutes to run" about a minute into it the message said "Hard drive needs replacement"
So we run to Circuit City, buy a Western Digital (those are still good right?) and replace the Maxtor drive with that. Computer restores fine and is back to normal.
I'm just surprised that Compaq tech support didn't have her run any diagnostic utilities on the system to determine the problem. Particularly when it's built into the BIOS. Then again, maybe I'm not surprised. I guess it's not a huge deal because the service center would've determined the cause and fixed it (for a fee) but still. Just seems that they didn't try at all on this one. I could be wrong though!
Oh well.
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WD Drive
Date: 2004-08-02 03:03 pm (UTC)I tend to put Seagate and WD in the top of hirearchy .. failure rates of about 2%-15% of the time. Samsung is somwhere in the 15% - 40%. And Maxtors ... well ... everyone I've known that has had major drive issues has had these. In fact, once upon a time Maxtor's had a confirmed failure rate in the 70 percentiles.