I got a Compaq 7478 free from a friend and wanted to get it up and running for the girls to use for school work. I only replaced the Hard Drive and Memory and added a Pioneer CD-RW to it. The new Hard Drive is a 20 Gig Western Digital, and the new memory is 256MB Chips for a total of 512. I dished out for the good stuff from
Upgrade Memory
Guaranteed to work with the system.
I took out the modem and extra CD-
Rom before I tried installing XP.
I found this forum and am thankful for the information as I got the new bios that allows me to get alot further than I have been getting.
I did the 0904 update with the 80 Pin Fix.
There's an AWEFUL lot of settings like the Gate A20 Option and when
you get toward the SDRam settings, they give you an aweful lot of settings, and if you don't know all of them, I guess your screwed!
I've been playing for 2 weeks on this blasted computer trying to get XP on it.
Can one of you whom were sucessful please give a general ideal of what you did that got you up and running with XP?
I've disabled all the cache options and shadowing options and I'm getting so darn close doing that! *Did the Fail Safe option in Bios first before disableing the Cache and Shadow options*
However, I've let it sit overnight in the Finalizing Installation and it said 17 Minutes at one point and 11 at another... It never finishes though and after the first reboot, I get a blue screen until I set it back at Optimized in the Bios and have the cache and shadowing back on.
It's a touch and go kinda situation but I've yet to get XP installed!
And 98SE is very buggy! I mean you lift your mouse off the pad to center it a bit more and it totally hangs the system! That's soooo very annoying!
Please help me and anyone else that wants to save a compaq for the kids to enjoy!
*Got XP installed - Faulty CD-
Rom was holding me back. Now I just can't keep it from crashing all the time.*
** Otay. I got it all fixed up now. The crappy Stock Fan and Heatsink wasn't working for crap. Got a nice new one on and it's working great.
Also took it up to 100Mhz FSB instead of 97Mhz **