• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Compaq Presario al-lin-ones

Funny you mention the IDE cable not being placed correctly. I did that last night a number of times when trying to sort the DEC on both the SB16 and logic board. Was a combo, well that's my excuse anyway, of being a bit drowsy, poor light and poor eye sight ;). It wouldn't post at all.
 
For those who are interested, here's the current offerings eBay has in the way of 4xx series machines:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Compaq-Prolinea...169?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item563e97bd01
http://cgi.ebay.com/COMPAQ-PROLINEA...0103261593?pt=Desktop_PCs&hash=item53d7d3b599

These are both Prolinea Net1/33 systems, which means built-in 33Mhz 486 (with socket for upgrades, ofc) and a built-in NIC that doesn't occupy one of the two ISA slots. I have a Net1/25, and it's a nice machine, almost identical to the 425. If you need standard ethernet ports and the board included with either machine is Thin or Thicknet, you can buy the cards on eBay for about $5USD+ship:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230222580080&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT
 
Yes I've seen all of these things (though admit I hadn't saved the Google Books link). In fact, Phreakindee (Lazy Game Reviews), who is a forum member here thanks to my prodding, is the one who inspired my affinity for these machines a while back. :D

He and I have had several conversations back and forth about the 425.
 
Went to fire up the CDS today and good ol COD-Clickity click, clickty click. Oh well, Ive got some spare and into the trash with that one. Just to to make sure nothing else was wrong I tested out a 150 meg Maxtor along with the BigFoot with overlay software. For the life of me I couldn't remember how to remove the Hdd tray. Removed the logic board and back of the case only to discover all needed to do was remove two torx screws on the front. Then another two to remove the cd/hdd tray-Doh! Good time for a dust off then.

MD 6.5 is going back on, with DDO, cause I know it supports all the hardware without any issues, ie no hunting for and installing divers. Should take about 4 hours as I've decided to install everything. Around 1.2 gig of goodies. Remember this is a 486DX2 66 so one should'nt be in a hurry ;). Ok some of the stuff didn't need installing but what the hell.

Some DDo weirdness. It hiccups saying the cd/hdd jumpers are set incorrectly, which they're not. The linux boot disk picks it up ok and accesses the data on the install cd ok does the partitioning of the hdd, installing files etc. May just go with that and use a boot disk to kick of initial startup. Interesting....

Hmmm some more weirdness. Ram count has dropped from 65 megs to 49 megs for some reason. Swapped out with a pair of known good sticks but still the same. Just stuck the smaller hdd in for the time being with New Deal Office so system is usable. Managed to get the cd recognised in dos eventually. Have no idea what the DDO software was on about. Joys of totoing.
 
Last edited:
Swapped out the ram again and it's recognising 65megs, so that's good. Must just be dirty contacts. Now I've just noticed cracks running up plastic from the top two of the corners of the crt. Haven't trolled the forum yet but I should imagine other members have repaired similar in the past. I suspect its because of the drastic temp changes recently as didn't notice a few days ago. A curious thing was Win 3.1 wouldn't load with the 49 or so meg memory count but is fine with the higher amount-"Weird or what?" NDO 3.2a loaded just as if nothing had happened.
 
Last edited:
i found a Compaq presario CDTV 520 on freecycle and i picked it up today. if is in pretty good shape and the tv tunner card is still in it. the guy i got it from was an older guy and he had what looks like everything that came with the computer. even the recovery disk and and driver disk for the tv tuner. the only problem with it is the hard drive that is in it was dead.
 
ya. i tried using the recovery cd but i think it will not work unless i have a stock hard drive. i kept getting errors so i took the hard drive from my other Compaq and just hooked it up and it loaded windows 98 fine. i installed the drivers and software for the tv tuner and it seems to work fine on windows 98 except i think the sound driver is messed up because the speakers are making this annoying sound when the volume is up.
 
i found a 500mb hard drive today and tried to use the recovery cd again and it worked. the Compaq version of windows 3.1 is definitely different. it is cool what you can use the computer for. you can use it as a phone, answering machine, fax machine or tv. i have also been doing some upgrades to it. it originally came with 12mb memory and an AMD 486 sx2 processor and now it has 52mb memory and a Intel overdrive dx2 processor. i also created a back-up of the recovery disk and broke it up and uploaded it to skydrive. i figured i would share since it is suppose to be good for more than just the cdtv520 and it is almost impossible to find recovery cd's and drivers this system. the only thing i could find for this system is upgrade patches. i was not able to locate and actual software. i did not upload the boot disk but you can make one using the file in the boot folder on the cd.
 
Took me weeks of searching through ancient FTPs and such to find most of the original software for my 425. If anybody ever finds Presario 4xx disks let me know..
 
Did you ever get the built-in Ethernet cards working on the 425s? I never had much luck under WfW 3.11 or Windows 95.
 
TBQH I haven't had the time to mess with that yet. I made sure all of my 4xx boxen have working floppy drives, HDDs, reasonable CPU upgrades, and RAM, though. All three are sitting in my closet not four feet away, waiting. Lately I've been on my modern boxes more, and my 300Mhz Pentium Voodoo 2 box is set up for vintage at the moment (I only set up one vintage box at a time, otherwise things get crazy).

Did you ever find the second motherboard/tray from the other machine? If you recall it had somehow got misplaced.
 
Sorry to double-post, but the thread needs to be bumped if I'm posting new info after that long. If I'm wrong, then please edit the posts together and forgive me.

I transplanted the CPU, RAM, and HDD from my Presario 425 into my Prolinea Net/1 (same device, slightly newer chipset model, network card instead of modem). It pagefaults on running Quake. I tried taking the network card out physically, thinking perhaps it was a conflict of some kind, but that changed nothing. Since the software is identical (transplanted HDD), the RAM is identical, and the CPU is identical (and the jumper settings were made identical), the only variable left is the slightly newer chipset. The 425 uses VLSI 9336 chips, the Net/1 uses VLSI 9340 chips. I was hoping it might be a little faster at Quake, and wanted to see - ended up just learning that Quake didn't run right on that box. Thought I'd share my findings - if you intend to run Quake you may want to steer away from the Net/1, unless you think it was something other than chipset compatibility, the cause I arrived at.

According to this picture set of a Presario 433 and it's motherboard, it uses yet another, even newer, chipset than either of the machines I have - a 9406 on the big chip, and.. what looks like a mismatched 9402 on the smaller chip.

(It's possible that he blocked hotlinking so that you can't view the image if you didn't come from his page. It works for me, and that's likely because I went to his page and saw it there first. I'll just remove the first link..)
http://eintr.net/systems/compaq/presario433/index.html (Check the motherboard pictures)

Indeed, I am very obsessed with these boxen.
 
Last edited:
Hi there!
I own a presario cdtv 528 but have none of the drivers. I was wondering whether somebody here could help me out with that?
Or maybe someone has a restoration disk of some sort?
A copy of the manual would also help me out quite a bit, or even just some info about the hardware specs. (I know the processor and the graphics card, but that's pretty much it...)
I put win 3.1 onto the machine but I get no sound.

What I found is this page here, but I don't know who much different the two set-ups are... http://www.pukepals.com/compaq-presario-cds-524-software-recovery-project/

I'd appreciate any help.
 
Pukepals has the German disks - as i see it mostly utilities and bloatware that came with it.
You can get it if you love German diagnostic tools and such...

Otherwise - only interesting drivers imho are the Video and sound card.

Video is a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424.
Sound is an ESS 688.

I packed both drivers for Windows 3.1 in a zip file in case you need them.

http://www40.zippyshare.com/v/LUtmLwR4/file.html


Some models also came with a TV tuner, but i guess analog TV reception is rare these days unless you live in a 3rd world country...
 
Thank you!
The sound driver is exactly what I need.
I actually got one with one of those TV cards in there, but the days of analog TV are long gone, even around here ;)
I do still have some issues with sound in DOS though. Some games (Like the secret of Monkey Island) don't have sound.
I also am trying to figure out what things to disable to free up some base memory.
A 486 was my first computer, but back then I had the luxury of my dad taking care of it ;)

Thx again for the quick response!
 
For DOS games like Monkey island you should set the "BLASTER" variable in autoexec.bat since the ESS 688 is sound blaster/sound blaster pro 2.0 compatible. By default the ESS 688 should have an IO Address of 220, an IRQ of 10 and a DMA channel of 1.


The BLASTER variable in autoexec.bat should look like this:

set BLASTER=a220 i10 d1

You can type this in a DOS command prompt before starting monkey island as a quick test. Try to change the IO Address from 220 to 240 if you still have issues.


Some games also have a configuration program that allows you to specify card type, IO Address, IRQ and DMA channel.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top