Customer Reviews

Compaq Presario SR5262NX Desktop PC (Intel Pentium Dual-Core Processor E2160, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB Hard Drive, Vista Premium)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I got this machine and it is awesome. I upgraded the video to a geforce 8400 256mb mem, integrated graphics do not handle workloads such as gaming and give you a poor display of windows aero. It is a great computer for modding with lots of space in the case. Specs you dont see are:

PCI-E slots: 16x 1, 1x1
2 PCI slots
250 watt power supply
dual cooling fans
2 ram slots (each one with 512 mb sticks)

The only cons are the low watt power supply (which I will be upgrading) and all of the installed programs such as HP total care,yahoo toolbar and search bar, and the office 2007 trial (60 days). You can remove all of those and the system will run like a dream Vista IS compatible with MS Ofiice 2003 Suite, so if you have that throw it all on there! I hope this helped!

Very disappointing. On starting up the PC for the first time, I got an error message "CPU Fan Failure .... system will shut down to prevent damage". After spending over an hour on the phone trouble shooting it with HP's tech support, I had to ship it back for service. Two or three weeks later, it came back. TheY replaced the motherboard and cpu fan. Tried starting it up again. This time, nothing whatosever appeared on the monitor. Spent another 1 or 2 hours on the phone with HP's support people. Finally, it turned out to be a cable inside the PC that was not seated properly. I had to unplug the cable and plug it back in for it to work. Note, this is a cable INSIDE the PC that had to be reconnected. Now it worked, or so it seemed. I tried to add some memory to it (this is only 2 months after first starting up the PC). In the process of adding more memory, I discovered that one of the memory banks was not working. Once again, spent an hour or two on the phone with HP support for them to confirm that one of the memory banks was not working. Just to be clear, that meant that the PC was running on 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB. I called their support people again trying to get my money back or a replacement PC. They told me only a "Case Manager" could do that for me. They promised a case mananger would call me in the next two days. One week later, no phone call. I called again, this time left my cell phone number. Once again was promised a phone call the next day. Nothing. I called again and finally got myself through to a case manager. He told me I should ship the PC back again for repair. I told him the last time I did that it came back defective and I didn't want to go through the hassle of shipping it again. He told me I have to ship it back twice before they'd ship me a replacement PC. I told him that was unacceptable but no budging on their part. The best they could do for me was to send a technician out to my house to fix it instead of me shipping it back. Even that was limited because the case manager told me that the technician would only replace the motherboard, not do any more troubleshooting. I preferred the technician over shipping it back. So we scheduled a technician and they FedEx'd a new motherboard to me for him to install. He came yesterday, spent an hour working on the PC only to find out that lo and behold, the motherboard they sent was missing a plate on the bottom that attaches it to the inside of the PC. So he put in an order for yet another motherboard to be sent to me. That's where things stand today. I can't wait to see what happens next.

My fundamental message to HP is: If your Support processes are supposed to keep customers returning to you, you might want to reconsider them. Do you really think I'm ever going to buy another one of your products if you expect that I should have to go through the trouble of shipping something back to you TWICE before you finally give me what I paid for? I know once a blue moon a PC will be shipped with issues. I would have been content if after the first time I shipped it back, and it came back with more problems, you offered to replace it then (or give me my money back). But to insist that I should send it back twice before you replace it with a new machine shows an unbelievable lack of customer understanding. Would you do that? I doubt it. It seems to me your Support policies have been developed from an internal HP perspective as oppsed to a customer perspective. But then again, maybe the object of your policies is not to retain customers, in which case you've certainly succeeded. What's really ironic about this whole experience is that you have probably spent 3 or 4 times the cost of a replacement PC by now with all the hours spent on the phone

We are happy with this computer. I would recommend it to anyone. We have loaded several programs and it is fast and quiet. For the price, you can't go wrong.

Got this for a good price. Hate that they filled the two memory slots with 512 each because I wanted to upgrade it to 2gb. I purchased the extra 1gb for $29 when I brought the computer for $262 4th of July weekend. Since I am giving this computer to relatives that have a dinosaur of a computer, I will not use the extra 1gb memory. What will I do with the free 512mb chip? I'm returning the memory to cut down on costs. Now my total is $262, a real good deal for a Pentium Dual-Core Processor that can be upgraded to 2gb. I've used it for a day or two and already have Vista on two other systems, so no complaints from me. The kids are going to love this. If you get it low buy but if it's over $319+ put a little more and get a system with more memory and a little faster processor. Keep looking until you find your value for the buck.

If you are interested in this item, please read all it's qualifications carefully. There is no Monitor. You will have to buy Speakers or The DVD Player will not work. You will also have to buy a decoder for the DVD or you cannot use it on all your DVD's or any CD's. I hope that is all I have to buy. But a Monitor is a necessity too.

To all: we bought the PC for Christmas. We got it on time.
It was not working. We wasted hours with HP customer service + tech service on the phone. They could not fixed it. We asked them many times to return the PC because we were feed fed up to spend so many hours on the phone. Eventually at the end of January-08, they accepted to send us a special box to return the PC. It took them a week to fix it and send us back. Apparently it was a problem of memory.
Now the PC seems to work.
We will never buy again from this Compaq or HP.
I hope it helps.
Franck

I bought this computer for myself for Christmas, 2007. It has Windows Vista pre-installed. I've been very happy with my computer over all.

There are too many pre-installed programs on it and HP, in it's eagerness to make it user friendly, has instead made it more complicated than it needs to be. I'm very computer experienced and I find all the pre-installed stuff to be messy and bothersome.

I hate the backup system (part of the HP Total Care Advisor). It does not give the user enough control over what is backed up. Even if I knew there were just a few additional files added, in order to do a backup it would need 5-6 DVD disks!!!!!!! And yes, I made sure it was set to only back up the changes since the last backup. HP must own stock in disk manufacturers. And now, the back up doesn't seem to be working at all. So I'll be backing up on my own again.

Another early issue was that the stand-by quit working within a few weeks. It won't "sleep" any longer.

But...overall it's been really good. No problems setting up hardware or software. When a program crashes (which is rare) it saves the files that were affected so they can be rescued. I've never had Windows Vista crash though. After using Windows for 15 years, and having every version since 3.1, that has been really impressive.

And I received a new computer game this Christmas (2008) that I was impressed and thrilled worked so well. Spore is the game and it seemed it might tax the system, but it's worked wonderfully.

I bought this computer at Best Buy, October 2007, on sale for roughly $450 or so. Not a bad computer for the money, however when having to contact HP for anything you will want to punch yourself in the head. Their customer service is outsourced, as most are these days. It was terribly frustrating to speak to someone I could barely understand that had to repeat everything I said back to me. The base warranty is crappy, as others have mentioned... you can't take it back to Best Buy without paying unless you paid extra for their warranty, and when you call HP they expect you to open the computer and detach wires unless you want to wait forever to send it back.

I'll start with the good. The hard drive is HUGE... to buy a base model computer and get a 320 gig hard drive is awesome. So much storage for my music, pictures, etc. Windows Vista Premium is nice, it does have its bugs (I'll explain later) but it's a fairly decent OS. Nice to look at. I hadn't bought a computer in 5 years, so getting headphone and aux jacks on the front as well as a memory card reader was a nice perk, although I think that's pretty standard nowadays. I listen to a lot of music on it and with slightly upgraded speakers from my old PC that include a woofer, I get very nice sound... although I wouldn't say it's "high definition" as the advertisements boast. It's fairly good, standard sound that most every computer produces.

As for the bad... here we go. From the get go, as soon as I installed Vista I started getting errors that crashed my computer. Two or three times EVERY DAY I would get a random error appearing from the system tray, and after googling it found out it was a failure in the intergrated graphics card. The computer would work slowly for about another 30-60 seconds after the message would appear, and it would black screen and freeze. I made multiple calls to HP and Intel, and kept getting told that I needed to update my graphics drivers. I did so repeatedly and nothing changed. Then I read online that updating the BIOS driver may help. Unfortunately, I could not find the model number for the motherboard in any of the paperwork or in any Vista settings. I gave up. Finally, a good 6 months or more after I purchased the computer, Intel released an update which came through automatic update and it finally fixed the problem. About time.

The memory card reader worked great for a few months. Then the SD slot, which is the ONLY ONE I ever use, stopped working. All the others work fine if I borrow a friend's card to test. I called HP about that as well, and they wanted me to do a system restore to try and fix it, which would essentially wipe out my computer. I would've had to back up all of my pictures, music, etc. Too much of a hassle, so I've given up thus far. I've resorted to using yet another USB cord to attach my camera. Eventually I will try calling HP again and telling them I tried a system restore (even though I didn't) and hopefully get the card reader fixed. Although it's going to be horrible to be without a computer for a month or more, based on what others users have said.

So the graphics card issue has been resolved and maybe everyone won't have memory card reader problems. But this one applies to everyone so read carefully! As other users have mentioned, the integrated graphics card isn't quiet powerful enough to run Windows Aero, which makes the detail on the screen much nicer and adds a few desirable features. You can disable Aero but that seems retarded because that's one of the very few perks of Vista Premium over Vista Basic, so why give the consumers an OS the computer has trouble supporting? You may want to consider upgrading the graphics card if you want more flawless performance graphics-wise, and definitely upgrade if you are a gamer of any sort.

Also, the 1 gig of memory may seem like a lot, but if you're a Windows XP user be warned that Vista is a MEMORY HOG!! I installed a CPU/RAM monitor, and running Vista with Aero and sidebar and no other programs utilized roughly 75-80% of my RAM. You can cut down a little if you turn off sidebar or Aero, but again I expect that I should be able to use all the advertised features of the PC immediately out of the box. Add in your web browser and media player, and you're already using all of your physical memory and additional virtual memory, which slows your computer down and doesn't work as efficiently as physical memory. I noticed that someone said the computer could upgrade to 4 gigs of RAM, but I don't believe that is true. In all the research and phone calls and everything I've gone through with the PC, I've only ever seen 2 gig as the max. And there's only 2 memory slots which are both utilized with two 512mb memory sticks. So now instead of buying a 1 gig memory stick to add, I have to buy 2 if I want the full 2 gigs. Then the old memory is sitting around useless.

Finally, the CPU fan was getting a little loud as of late. Today as I was writing this, it sounded like it went into hyperdrive for a second and I thought it was going to blow. However it seems to have returned to normal, I just hope it's not a sign of ANOTHER problem I will have.

Overall, I wouldn't really recommend this PC unless you're getting a great deal on it. I only paid $450 and I don't feel I'm getting my money's worth. I would recommend looking at other PC manufacturers and reading reviews before buying, because for $450 you can do a lot better. Too many problems and horrible customer service. If you do end up buying it, be sure to get an extended warranty from either HP or your retailer!!

I couldn't be happier with my purchase. The computer does everything I need for both personal and business purposes, and the price certainly can't be topped. By far the best PC I've ever owned.

This was an OK deal - don't look for this computer to include much. Runs a little slow. But still OK for my daughters first computer.