Not Hopelessly Out of Date, Yet

Not Hopelessly Out of Date, Yet

I have a 2004 Compaq NC6000 lying around the house that I have used for various experiments over the years. It is a very small full-size notebook--a bit smaller than the notebook that I normally use, but still reasonably fast (1.6 Ghz, 1 GB of RAM). Most recently, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it--forgetting that I didn't have a restore disk for Windows. Anyway, the last time I tried to do a restore from a different version of Windows (for which I do have a license), it messed up pretty well--or so I thought.

However, the hard disk seems to have failed. I was getting disk write/read failures, then it completely disappeared (regarding a power off restart to make it reappear). There was also the joyful clicking noise that usually indicates that a read/write head is making contact with something a bit more solid than gas.

Well, I also have a 20 GB notebook drive that I never got around to using for its intended purpose, and I had been thinking of selling it on eBay, along with some of the other odds and ends that I don't need, such as these valves, and this Colt Government Model thumb safety. (I'm not going to get rich on junk like this, but I'm never going to need these items, someone else gets to use them, and I get enough money for them to justify the effort.)

I was surprised to see how many notebook hard disk drives there are available on eBay, often quite inexpensive--and no one's buying them. So I figured that I should test this 20 GB drive before putting it on eBay--and what better solution than to test it by putting it in this Compaq NC6000?

I used to be a pretty serious computer hobbyist, back in the era when RAM came in DIPs, a 5 MB hard drive for your PC cost $2000, and I was living high on the hog because I had 576K (that's K, not M) of RAM in my IBM PC! But I sort of dropped out, somewhere around the time that DIMMs became common. So I was a little unsure of whether I was up to the task.

It turns out that the Compaq NC6000's hard disk drive uses what is called a "caddy," which combines a pulling strap with a converter that changes from the 44 pin ATA/IDE connector to the internal bus used by the Compaq. This was pretty easy to remove and install on the 20 GB drive--except that two of the screws used a very, very strange Philips head. It looked quite normal--except that there was no almost no recess, so the only way to get a grip on them was to use the end of a knife blade. Yet two of the other screws were quite traditional Philips head.

And indeed, after installing the caddy on the 20 GB drive, it appears that it works just fine. I'm installing an operating system on it now to give it a thorough test; at least, I can sell it with confidence that the drive works. I am still trying to decide whether having a spare notebook that I can use to back up my current work onto--and small enough to easily port on an airliner--makes more sense than trying to sell it.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, I am beginning to see why I have heard some complaints about Compaq's device driver support. There's both a wired and a wireless Ethernet adapter in the hardware, but for some reason, the Windows installation doesn't find have drivers for them. I've tried to load all the likely device drivers, but Windows doesn't seem to find them at reboot.

UPDATE 2: Very interesting. Even though the Ethernet interface doesn't show up anywhere, even for the wired interface--if the cable is plugged in, Windows apparently knows to download updates. Still trying to figure out how to get the wireless drivers installed.

UPDATE 3: It took a while, because there were several different wireless network interfaces offered in the NC6000, but I finally found the one that works. (And I'm using it right now to blog this update.) I'm a little disappointed that it appears the only way to find out the details of the wireless network interface are to either open up the notebook, or keep installing drivers until you accidentally hit the right one. I looked in Control Panel, System, Device Manager, and it would only show me that I didn't have the right driver--not what hardware was actually installed.