More on the aforementioned HP (and other computer manufacturer’s) resorting to ELCHEAPO customer support. It came about as a attempted to install the 64-bit XP on the HP Pavilion a530n, which sports an AMD Athlon 64 processor.
I am uploading this article in pieces since I just wrote about 5 opr 6 paragraphs that evaporated as MT-Blacklist (which was running in the background , deleting the glut of spam comments I have received, finished and refreshed my browser window which contained all my MT entry window….so I begin again)
Click the “Continue Reading” link below to read on
About a month ago, I experienced the start of this pain in the butt when I bought the a530n, which , in and of itself, seems like a great box. I was looking at what to do for an upgrade as my son’s computer (my old Aptiva with an P2 400, bought in 1999) started showing signs of expiration — fan noises, hard drives quitting, etc.). As I did before, in 2001, when I got my emachines P4 1.5 ghz, I was passing it down after I find a new system for my office. I looked at buying a case/power supply, motherboard (an ASUS) with P4 3.0 GHz, 1 gb RAM, and a new DVD writer (something quicker than 1x). At compusa it came to $930 before tax. Then I looked at systems from the ones like Sony, HP, Compaq, and emachines. I found an HP at Circuit City that wasn’t INtel, (it is the Athlon 64 3200+) but it came with a 200gb hard drive (my parts package didn’t even include a new hard drive since I was going to use the WD 160gb I had gotten a couple months ago. ) It laso had front panel CF, SD, MMC/SD and MS/MSPRO card readers, and headphone and mic jacks and an IEE 1394 port on front and one of each on the back, and one USB2 on front and 3 or 4 on back.
The case isn’t big, but the price got me. This was 949 with a $50 rebate, and another $150 rebate with purchase of a printer an monitor (for which I chose an emachines 17″ for $99 after a $110 rebate, and an HP INkjet for $29 after a $50 rebate, so I was at a net of $879 after rebate for the system with Monitor and printer, so I got a 2 year Circuit City coverage on the box for about $199. 949 + 209 + 79 +200 = 1437 – 360 = 1077, so it’s $877 for the system before the service policy.
Then the fun.
After removing my 160gb hard drive from the old box and setting up the second hard drive (80gb) as the boot drive, and getting XP home installed, (I copied the contents of the 80gb drive, which had about 40gb of my stuff on it to the new machine’s 200gb drive, to put back on the 160gb drive once I installed that in the new system, for a total of 360gb of space), I commenced to start the upgrade of the pre-installed XP home to XP Pro. An easy upgrade, right? It had been painless on my emachines computer, so no problem on this one, right?
In my post here I describe the problem at that point. After finally resorting to a wipe and new install of XP Pro (and the loss of the stuff I had copied over to the new hard drive from my old machine’s second drive, about 40gb ‘s worth, including all my old pst files for Outlook…about 4 years worth of email files , since in my frustration I forgot that I had not yet moved that stuff over to the second hard drive (the 160gb WD drive I had transplanted from the old machine), so the reformat of the available space on the 200 gb drive (there was an HP recovery partition I left intact) wiped out the C:\backupOldFiles I had put those into. My fault, but left me with a big old grudge against HP for making me go through this in the first place).
Now, for Party #2. The install of 64 bit XP. I had a 50gb partition available, so I thought “Great”. I’ll put the 64bit install there. So I ran the install, told it to install on that 50gb partition, and it started copying files. Upon the first reboot, Bluescreen: NTLDR is missing or corrupt. I booted from the 64bit install CD to Windows Recovery Console. No “bootfix” command! Whaaa? I looked at MAP and it showed that the HP Recovery partition was seen as C:. I later tried the XP Pro CD to boot up and go to Recovery Console. There was bootfix. I ran it. NBow MAP shows me the the HP recopvery partition was L:, and the 50gb partition was C: and my existing XP Pro install was on E:
Promising. So I re-ran the 64 bit install, chose the 50 gb partition, and the install said the partition didn’t look like a bootable partition, so I went into Partition magic via some boot disks, hid the HP partition, a nd tried again. Same message. I suspected that the HP partition was still in the way. I saw another option: reformat the 50gb partition. It worked. The first reboot presented me with the Windows Splash screen with 64-bit edition proudly displayed under the Windows logo. After I completed (and also found my Network card , which Xp Pro had not done), as well as my Video Card (which XP Pro had also not done). Audio was missing, and later I discovered that the Card Readers also aren’t there….any ideas on this one are appreciated…….later additional note ….2:16pm same day……the Card readers DO work. Just tiried it again. )
I found a 64-bit nVidia Nforce driver package (nForce_4.34a_WinXP64_international.exe) and this fixed thwe audio. I didn’t choose the IDE install — still unsure and afraid of this one) but the Card readers are still not working. Anybody know?
Last, I found this morning that I have no DVD playback on the 64bit install. I put in the HP disk that contained the Power DVD package I got with my HP DVDWrite 200i I bought last year. This had worked for me in XP Pro during that ordeal I described earlier. In 64-bit windows, the disk would not start the installation wizard that lets you install any or all of the DVD-writer software packagaes available. I tried the install under the PowerDVD directory on the CD, but it stopped and asked for a CD-key, which, in the HP world, you don’t get. The CD install apparently plugs that in when you run the main install wizard. I lookd on Google for “HP PowerDVD CD-key” and found a forum where someone supplied a CD key. Bingo! POwerDVD 3 now works as a 32-bit app under 64bit XP.