From: Brendan <...>
Subject: compaq presario
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 14:49:11 +0100

Hi,

Your webpages have been very helpful to me, so I thought I'd pass on my 
successes failures and see if you want to add them...

I have the 722EA, ie Duron 1.1Ghz, 20Gb etc.

You dont get the XP CDs, but a recovery CD with the floppy boot image, which 
uses XP factory defalts and user images in the D: FAT32 partition. I couldnt 
find the *.SCR file but eventually found a work around others might be 
interested in if they dont have parition magic (or they do, like me, but see 
no reason to upgrade it for a single use)... If you fill up the D: drive, and 
remove the USER images in d:\data\en and reboot with the CD you can make a 
new user backup. The first thing this does is non-destructively repartition 
the D: drive with an extra 2.5 Gb. If you do this several times, moving the 
USER images out of d:\data\en each time, you will end up with an identical XP 
partition and (in my case) 16Gb of FAT that Linux can repartition.

I loaded Mandrake 8.2 without a problem, taking the "generic laptop screen" 
in case it made a difference.

I put LILO onto the MBR and can boot into XP OK (I add this because of the 
number of webpages that obfuscate how easy this is).

I compiled in the sound module last night, which has squawked at me a few 
times but time will tell if there's a pattern there (apart from the power-on 
squawks I know about). The volume control switches work, which was a pleasant 
surprise.

Now the failures...

The fan always seems to be one, and I have tried putting noathlon in the 
bootup. I shall look into ACPI/APM to see if this is having an effect... One 
thin I might have read somewhere is that ext3 is a bad idea since it keeps 
the disks active...

Rebooting doesnt work - it just hangs on the COMPAQ screen, and has to be 
manually switched off. The power down seem to hang on powrdown, and I would 
have expected it to power itself off here. It's not the LILO since rebooting 
from XP to Lilo works fine.

Xine just hangs the whole PC with or without a DVD inserted.

I've seen a couple of projects for the easy access keys (hotkeys is one, and 
funkeys is another) but haven't got any further with that. 

Have you got the batteries calibrated in KDE/Gnome/Whatever? 

At the moment the only thing that bothers me is the fan going, and the fact I 
cant gauge battery power left... so any help here would be appreciated.

Otherwise - thanks for the web pages, I'll let you know if I find anything 
else useful...

Brendan