[Imc-g8-2005] about those Compaq PCs (techie stuff)

[kriptick]

Just been thinking about these Compaq PCs having had to play with some
elsewhere recently. Has anyone had a chance to tinker with these yet,
particularly testing the network boot ability? I've had some consistently
unhappy experiences with Compaq kit especially when the HDDs have been
wiped. Compaq BIOSs are particularly egregious being homegrown & totally non
standard & also they often farm out the setup part of the BIOS onto a secret
partition on the HDD that gets run by you pressing F10 during a short
prompted window in the POST sequence. See here:
http://www29.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FAQ5473
So what this means is that if these HDDless models that we have adopt this
rather revolting practice (a quick google seems to indicate they both do) &
if we want to change default BIOS settings like enabling network boot if
it's disabled or maybe it's way down in the boot priority device list, since
these have NO HDD then this'll entail much extra config work. One would have
to locate the 2 BIOSs to download for the 2 diff models - which is no mean
feat, I've had to ring up Compaq support & plead with them to tell me which
file to download cos their support site files were all wrong. You'd then
have to install these 2 BIOSs onto the secret partitions on 2 diff HDDs &
whizz round connecting these to each of the 50 PCs in turn, booting each up,
F10 accessing setup & making & saving neccessary changes. Quite a lot of
extra work. I MAY be wrong about this. They may network boot fine straight
off the pallet but I'm just alerting those who set these up to the
possibility of extra work which they'll prob need like a hole in the head.

I really don't like compaq stuff - does it show?
;-)