1 post tagged “compaq”

I found it pretty difficult to pair up specific commercial desktop PCs with their internals.  With the help of eBay, I was able to identify the motherboard in my version of the Compaq SR1650NX.  For reference sake it's the A8AE-LE (AmberineM).

Motherboard manufacturer is ASUS model A8AE-LE
HP/Compaq name is AmberineM-GL6E

Why is this so important, well it's called CMOS scramble, also commonly come across as an XP system that freezes at a certain point during the boot-up process.  This afternoon, my system wouldn't boot up because it "froze" on MUP.SYS.

Through much research, I've found information on this particular topic to be totally wrong, with only a couple of notable exceptions.  Everyone in the world seems to think that there's a "hardware" problem, causing people to replace CPUs, memory, and the BIOS in one case I found.  After hours of sweat thinking, "damn, I don't wanna have to get another PC", I was searching for replacement motherboards.  Someone was selling a Compaq replacement for about $199.  Ummm... that's more than twice as much as the motherboard's really worth, particularly since it's a standard ATX board.

When I narrowed down the motherboard model, I found that HP had an entry in the support area for this motherboard, including the all important MoBo diagrams and more importantly... the jumper settings.  Why is that important?  On some systems the CMOS memory can get scrambled for whatever reason.  Clearing the CMOS is really the only way to fix this problem.  MUP.SYS has nothing to do with the error (actually, it's probably more like whatever comes next).  Well, anyways, I found the jumper setting to clear the CMOS setting... On the Mac, we call it resetting the PRAM (like when the Mac doesn't quite get through it's internal checks and boot properly... kind of like what I was experiencing with my WinAMD machine).  Well, 5 hours later and a busted SATA connector that yanked right out of the motherboard (yes, I released the lock on the cable)... it works!  It took 6 seconds to reset the CMOS and I was up and running again.

In the old days, that type of information used to be packaged with the system.  These days, manufacturers want you to jump through hoops or pay tons for what amounts to quickly fixing something.