|
My mother has a Compac Presario, about the same year, and maybe even the same model. Heck, you might even be running Windows ME off of Compaq's licensed recovery CD at that. After the second time of trying to reload her ME OS from that recovery CD, the heck with that, went out and bought her a copy of XP Home Edition for a little over $100 way back then. A copy of XP Home Edition goes for about $175 now and is getting harder to find, and is so expensive because of supply and demand thanks to Vista. I had to change the hard drive in hers years ago when it was still under warranty. As I recall, did have to do it through the side panel. Don't recall taking the front off, other than maybe the plastic cover, and not sure if I even did that...way back when. If I did have to take that plastic cover off, I'm thinking its locks would've been accessable after took the side covers or shell off. But I don't see pulling a hard drive through the front of a chassis or having mounting screws through the front of the chassis. Whatever I had to do back then, I didn't break anything, and I'm like a bull in a China shop, so can't be that tough. I'm not where I can see Mom's PC, so can't say for sure. Take another closer look. I'm trying to imagine the hard drive mounting. Usually with that style of hard drive, are two screws on each side that mount to a chassis or tray of its own, and the trays usually or might have a locking screw at the rear of them to hold or lock them in place in the larger computer chassis. I honestly don't recall having to take that huge front off, but maybe I did. Sure there aren't maybe clips holding the hard drive tray or mounting in place if not a locking screw at the rear? The newer PCs are even easier yet...side cover slides off, no screws, just a locking tray, power cord, and ribbon cable SATA or otherwise. Its time you replace that pentium 2 processor anyway. The newer softwares (think Vista too) are written so crappy these days, need at least a pentium 4 to load a program in under a day because are so crappy in the area of quality control. I have an older pentium 4 (antique now), and mentioned to an IT guy how slow loading newer programs are, and like frozen mud on Mom's pentium 2. His response was the processors are good, software anymore is junk and requires the faster more powerful processors to make up and cover for their...crappyness. Anymore, need a dual core processor to run programs, and they make my pentium 4 look as fast as frozen mud. Good luck. Mark
|
