PCA Forums

i recently installed win2k pro to upgrade from winME. now i have no sound, and it's searching for drivers for the modem (pci simplenet) and the ethernet card (ipaq 10/100). i've checked all over for driver and can't find a thing... not even on compaq's site. can anyone help? do i have to just recover back to winme until they come out w/ drivers if they're not available?

thanks,
deo

I did the same upgrade on my Toshiba laptop but my laptop was also shipped with Win2K as an option and they have all their drivers at their website so it was easy.
If you're unable to find your Win2K drivers at Compaqs website, I'd either call or e-mail their tech support people before giving up.

First off, are you SURE you want to put Win2K on this lappy? If it doesn't have at LEAST 192Mb (256 would be better) I wouldn't bother with it. Win2K is much more RAM hungry than Win9X.

Drivers are ALWAYS an issue with laptops. It's unlikely Compaq ever released Win2K drivers for it - I don't think Compaq EVER shipped a lappy with Win2K.

You're S.O.L. unless you can find generic drivers. Video is usually easy IF you know the chipset. There's really not all THAT many video chipsets out there. It's probably Trident, Sis or ATI. Check the specs on their website, or look at the info for the WinME drivers to find out.

Sound can be harder - some chipsets can be pretty obscure. Again you'll need to find out the manufacturer and chipset and go to their website and look.

You need to find out who makes the NIC - it's not made by Compaq. They generally use Intel.

Here's some places you might find drivers:
http://www.driverguide.com/
http://www.modem-help.freeserve.co.uk/
http://modemsite.com/

Not much that can be done, it's easiest to go back to ME.
Compaq does not support Win2000 on their older Presario Notebooks (consumer series), they used Win2000 on their older Armada Notebooks (corporate series).
I had luck installing Win2000 on my old Presario 1688 Laptop ... but that was just that, luck.

I have a Compaq 12xl 1100 and tried the Win2k upgrade.
Well no sound and no modem... I added my own NIC.
After searching the net...I found out that Compaq does not support Win2k in this model and there are NO drivers. Although there are work arounds and I finally got it working (email me if you want the solution). The performance was bad and the DVD played like Crap so I went back to Win98.
Now that XP is out I tried installing XP on the computer and it works wonderfully and the DVD plays good. So you might consider XP if your wanting something like Win2K. But Like mentioned above...I hope you have added memory. I am running 192megs and I want more.
Enjoy

compaq sux so bad....
even if they claim to have support, their stupid ass 15mb driver downloads don't friggin' work