Compaq Presario SR1937UK - Pentium D 940 3.2 GHz > Reviews > My 9 months experience of this computer

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Design	Satisfactory
Manufacturer Support	Excellent
Ease of use	Satisfactory
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Good components spec
Disadvantages:	FSB slow, could be prone to crashing

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I bought this computer last year in August. One month before Core 2 Duo came out in the UK and just before the scheduled date of the Vista OS release. With hind sight I should have waited a while so that I could take advantage of the new OS and processor technology but I was desperate at the time so I thought this was the best valued computer in my price range.

I managed to get this PC inc a 19 inch screen for £870. I thought this was quite a deal considering the dual 3.2 Ghz processor, 512 Mb Geforce 7500LE Turbocache graphics card, 2 GB RAM with 4Mb L2 cache and 300GB HDD (7200 RPM). I do think that the FSB at 800 MHz is a little poor though, compared to the rest of the components they should have included an FSB of at least 1000 Mhz.

Looking at the prices now it still looks like quite a deal compared to other more expensive computers out there which have still have lower specs but will have the Core 2 Duo processors to make up for it. The question is then do you sacrifice the spec of most of your computer’s components for a computer with a Core 2 Duo processor? I’ll let you decide but I personally think it’s not worth it as there are other more expensive components in your computer to sway your decisions.

My experiences aren’t all good though as I have recently been playing Tiberium Wars (check out my review !!) which requires a min spec of:

Windows XP, Windows Vista (32-bit; 64-bit versions of Vista are not supported)
2.0GHz or better, or AMD equivalent
512MB or better
8x or faster DVD-ROM Drive
8.0GB or more of free hard disk space
GeForce4, ATI Radeon 8500 or better (ATI Radeon 9200 and 9250 PCI, NVIDIA Geforce 4 MX cards not supported.)
DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
Network, Internet Multiplayer: 2 players (no voice support) - 56 Kbps Internet connection; 2-8 players (with voice transmission) - Broadband Connection

However, I still get my computer freezing or crashing and restarting on its own half way through a large battle on this game. I would have thought having a spec of at least double the min requirements would mean that I could handle anything this game had to throw at me but I was very wrong. So for all you big gamers, if you were considering getting this computer to play some seriously intense games with a lot going on the screen then you have been warned. This problem even persisted when I turned all other programs running in the background off and turned all the game visual settings to minimum. Very strange !!!

I then started to notice that in my device manager I had a yellow flag next to RAID Host Controller. I thought this very peculiar as I only have one hard drive and consequently couldn’t see the use of having a RAID controller anyway. Naturally I assumed this was the reason for all the problems incurred so far so I disabled the controller in the hope that I would never have the problem of not being able to load windows again. This stopped any problems for about a week and then my comp started behaving strangely again.

3 months into owning this comp and things started to go really wrong. My computer wouldn’t load into windows and instead entered a viscous loop of trying to load windows followed by a 1 min pause on a black screen and then it restarted itself and started the doomed cycle again. I would say that 1 in every 10 attempts to load my PC was successful. Not good for a 3 month old PC. I decided to wipe the hard drive just in case of any unforeseen software problems or some form of virus silently marauding through my hard drive. All went well for a week or so then the problem came back again. Whilst swearing like a nun with torrets, I decided to do another reformat in the hope that it wasn’t a hardware problem. As you can probably guess the problem came back so I phoned the manufacturers and explained the situation. They were quite sympathetic and they told me that they recently had a surge of calls with people having the same problems with this model. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I needed a new motherboard because I had apparently knocked the computer and damaged the circuit board. Now, I treat my computer with nothing but tender loving care and the hardest knock my computer ever received wouldn’t have even torn a wet paper bag. Therefore, with the same complaints being made by others, I have concluded in my own mind that there must be a fundamental problem with the motherboard or the motherboard assembly components.

5 months on with the new motherboard and I haven’t had any problems….touch wood. If you are having the same problems that I mentioned earlier then there’s quite a good chance that it’s your motherboard that’s faulty. I hope this was useful for current owners and potential buyers.