Presario SR5152NX Upgrades - Back to Home

Some time ago, I wrote about the old Compaq Presario PC that had been sitting in my basement for at least a year. I decided I wanted to turn it in to something that has a purpose in life, and that's where this adventure begins.

The floppy header, somewhat unusual for a machine this new.

One thing I noticed while looking at the BIOS was that it supported a floppy drive, which I didn't know, considering it's from the dying breaths of the floppy era. Also in the picture; the power supply uses 20 pin ATX, but the motherboard uses 24 pin, which always looks super weird to me.

The chosen floppy drive was a Sony from 2002, stolen from a Vaio media center PC that I scrapped over a year ago. Since it has no faceplate due to Sony's questionable case design (cases with those floppy drive "mail slots" are not my favorite, partially because the drives traditionally don't have faceplates) this drive wouldn't be useful in any application where looks mattered.

The computer with the floppy drive installed.

The process of actually installing the drive was painful. More than painful. Compaq made the cases as hard to work on as humanly possible.

First problem was that the cables for the PSU and various other things were all in the way. This required chopping off the zipties that held them together, and then unplugging about half of all the cables from the motherboard. Because the case was so tight, it took around 5 minutes of trial & error to get them plugged in again.
Second problem was that you have to physically break the case to install a new drive. Inside the case, there were pieces of metal that covered the drive bays (image below) and the only way to get them off was to break them off. The plastic front panel also had a cover that must be broken. Compaq really wants you to not upgrade your computer in any way. Sad that HP killed the Compaq everyone loved.

Those metal covers that must be broken off to install a new drive.

After a good 30-45 minutes was spent doing an installation that should've taken no more than 10 minutes, I was left with an impressively ugly computer:

After all this, at least the drive ended up working fine. Tested it with some disks, everything was running smooth. But don't worry, there's still plenty more to this story.

Windows FLP Installation

Windows Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs.

Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs was an obscure OS released in 2006 that's basically Windows XP with less stuff packed in. It was designed for old 90s systems still stuck on 9x or NT4, which had both lost support around the time of FLP's release. There's no reason to use it on a machine that can easily run the full version of XP, but I thought I'd try FLP just to mix things up.

Setup was far more difficult than I wanted it to be. The installer refused to delete the old Windows 7 partition for unknown reasons, so I just restarted the installer over & over until it decided to let me delete it.

After the "first boot agent" took an embarassing amount of time to do whatever it was doing (at least an hour) I was met with the login prompt. Similar to Server 2003, it tries to make you press Ctrl+Alt+Del before you can log on, but you can disable it via the group policy editor.

As expected, Windows was missing a good amount of drivers.

Windows wasn't too happy with drivers, or lack thereof.

How the card reader displays itself in My Computer.

The card reader in this machine has the annoying behavior of displaying each card slot as an induvidual removable drive, regardless if there's actually a memory card inserted. Definitely a nitpick, but the cluttered My Computer is unsightly to me.

I think that's the end of the Compaq Presario story. I'll continue using it as a test machine for whatever hardware or software I feel like installing, but other than that, I don't have any plans for it.