April 1st, 2015
About a year ago, I acquired a Compaq Presario SR5510F computer. I had heard that the previous owner had been having trouble with it, but I thought repairing it would have been easy enough. In the end, I was kind of right - but for the most part wrong.
When I first got the machine, it had trouble booting. That is, it wouldn't. It had 2 sticks of 1 GB RAM. Upon some troubleshooting, I disovered that the issue seemed to lie with the RAM. When one stick was removed, the machine would at least boot up and seemed to work. However, 1GB of RAM didn't seem to be enough for the machine.
I went ahead and purchased a 2GB RAM stick and installed it and it worked. Well, sort of. I've been using the machine now and again for about a year now. The trouble with it is that it is still very temperamental. Now and then, for no good reason, I'll be met with the blue screen.
Due to this blue screen tendency, the machine is not very reliable. I've looked into replacing the motherboard, but after a quick search, it looks like buying a newer desktop machine would be the best option. It's simply not worth the additional time and money to invest in this machine. At least new machines tend to have a year warranty, and the reasonable price of decent machines makes buying a new machine more sensible in this situation.
I decided to write this article because a number of sites on the web have dealt with this issue and it seems like a good number of people are looking for fixes. Hopefully, the details of my experience will help them make the best decision possible when dealing with the issue.