The phrase " knighted clumsily with a meat cleaver" comes to mind.
I just took on a small gig to fix up a Compaq which … came with an unusual assortment of bafflements.
I don’t normally work on PeeCees. Those I do work on are fairly large cases, room for slots, drives, that sort of thing.
This … box had an external powersupply. Like for a laptop. Weird. Ok.
The tower has enough room for an internal power supply, but — and I am not making this up — Compaq chose to use an HP power supply for the machine instead. And use a medium sized fan in the back loosely positioned over the heatsink for the CPU (which itself has no fan).
It also conveyed the illusion that you could install extra cards inside—there was room enough, but the mainboard literally has no PCI slots. Two DIMM slots, four USB ports, two internal SATA devices (optical and a 3.5 in. HD), and that is literally it, full stop. No bluetooth, no wifi, ethernet’s on the mainboard with gfx—nothing else. This isn’t “bare bones” it’s missing limbs.
This machine, in spite of being substantially larger, is literally and absolutely less expandable than our Mac Mini server (which has no front-load slot for optical drive media). The size of the Compaq’s case feels like false advertising.
No doubt it was cheap. It looks and feels it. I put zero faith that it will live as long as our now ten-year old Mac mini server.
Say what you will about Apple’s designs, at least they make things that are useful and durable.
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