Compaq Presario v3424 Laptop - Bad Experience
One of my friend purchased a new HP/Compaq v3000 (v3424TU) series laptop (Rs.35K) . The laptop comes with Vista Home Basic pre-installed. Soon he found that he cannot run IIS in Vista Home Basic and so he decided to install XP.
After starting the XP installation, he found that XP will not install in his laptop because XP could not detec the harddrive. After a long search in google, we found that HP boards use a different type of native SATA bus which is different from the generic SATA standards. XP with SP2 doesnt have drivers that support native SATA (but XP has drivers that support generic SATA). So XP cannot detect this laptop’s hard drive.
The only solution he had is to upgrade his OS to Vista Home Premium by paying Rs.9K or Install Ubuntu / Debian Linux.
In some forums people have posted that flashing the BIOS may help to unlock the SATA option. But thats a risky option, so we decided not to try that.
Lessons Learned:
1. The word “pre-installed” means the OS is installed, but you wont get a OS CD/DVD. In case of crash or OS re-install you have to purchase a OS.
2. HP and Microsoft may have some ’secret’ agreement to push Vista. Because the v3000’s BIOS doesnt have any option to turn off the native SATA support. Thus leaving no option to install any other OS than Vista.
3. Before buying a laptop that comes with Vista pre-installed or says “Vista Compatible”.. make sure XP or Linux can be installed or not.
4. Looks like HP / Compaq does not provide any driver CDs. Locating the drivers in HPs website is one big head-ache.
5. When purchasing HP/Compaq laptops or Desktops, ensure if you will get a OS CD as well as Driver CD.
Conclusion:
My friend said that this would be his first and last HP/Compaq purchase. 