I've a soft spot for the DeskPro 2000, My first IT job we had 20 or so in the process of been replaced.
But they were so reliable they ended up getting 2nd jobs as lightweight servers or emergency swap out PC's.
I ended up taking them all home in the early 2000's only to throw them out few years later, still regret that and would love one in my fleet

chinny22 wrote on 2024-01-09, 23:55:

I've a soft spot for the DeskPro 2000, My first IT job we had 20 or so in the process of been replaced.
But they were so reliable they ended up getting 2nd jobs as lightweight servers or emergency swap out PC's.
I ended up taking them all home in the early 2000's only to throw them out few years later, still regret that and would love one in my fleet

My first PC was a Compaq 😀) a Contura 430C to be precise, with 486DX4. It was quite amazing. That's when my love for pre-HP Compaqs began.

This Deskpro is as you describe; reliable and responsive, even after living in a damp garage for two decades. If I get my hands on a second one, I'll let you know.

Here's a few notes on Deskpro 2000, in case you're planning to get one.

The original Compaq cable management was great, but as I populated the slots it got... interesting. Nevertheless, it is quite possible, if you put effort and zipties into it.

The airflow is surprisingly good for a PC from the era. The front intake bracket takes either a 80mm or 92mm fan, comes unpopulated. It blows directly on the CPU heatsink, and I suggest you add a dust filter as I did. The only exhaust being the PSU 92mm fan, it will eliminate most of the dust problem.

The exhaust from PSU is directly next to the PCI slots, so Voodoo graphics will get some amount of cooling.

The top CPU on this system is PII 333MHz, as the FSB is hardwired to 66MHz. There are switches on the motherboard to set the CPU speed up to 300MHz, but I think those are irrelevant for Deschutes CPUs, because those have a fixed multiplier. This might explain why Intel released them with a fixed multiplier: older motherboards did not have the settings for higher clock speeds like 333MHz, so this provides some amount of backwards compatibility.

If you're into overclocking, this is not the system for you. The Compaq setup and diagnostics program is great for setting up and maintaining your computer. It also offers no viable options to overclock it.

Even though the 440LX chipset supports AGP, the riser board doesn't. Clearly Compaq didn't intend this system to be used for gaming, which is a pity. The onboard video, as stated above, is a Matrox Mystique, which is great for 2D, not so great for 3D because it doesn't even support bilinear filtering.

For gaming adding a Voodoo is a good choice, as the onboard graphics cannot be replaced.
If you want an AGP system, have a look at the 6000 (maybe some 4000 as well), as they have an AGP port next to the riser.
Beware, the AGP card need a special half height double width bracket, so not every AGP board will fit.
IBM used the same brackets for some of their PC300GL systems.

eisapc wrote on 2024-01-11, 11:40:

For gaming adding a Voodoo is a good choice, as the onboard graphics cannot be replaced. If you want an AGP system, have a look […]
Show full quote

For gaming adding a Voodoo is a good choice, as the onboard graphics cannot be replaced.
If you want an AGP system, have a look at the 6000 (maybe some 4000 as well), as they have an AGP port next to the riser.
Beware, the AGP card need a special half height double width bracket, so not every AGP board will fit.
IBM used the same brackets for some of their PC300GL systems.

I have one of those Dell TNT2 Pro cards with half-height brackets:
https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-Video-Profile-1 … /dp/B0045JSPL8/

Guess I need to check if those might work.

This motherboard looks awesome, with ESS AudioDrive onboard audio and an AGP slot:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/compaq … 4000-pentium-ii

EDIT: I also saw a pretty nice Compaq Deskpro EN series with Slot 1, 440BX and an AGP 2x slot. Might be a better idea to get that one, to distinguish these two computers.

We also had Deskpro 4000's. I never really knew the difference, (a never had any need to open them up) I remember both were 233Mhz and had ESS AudioDrive but being office machines we never plugged speakers in so wouldn't have noticed the different position of the jacks. A really cool feature was the soundcard could use the internal speaker which was enough for basic noise like an error ding or new email notification.

We had a few mismatched slot 1 EN series machines mostly the SFF form factor, the ones with the full hight CD drive felt better built then the slim line CD drives.

Back in the day, that was 2003 I was a TV tech repair person at point of hire date, they were running unreliable, slow computers on 98SE, I picked up a Deskpro 2000 or 4000, this is a desktop with odd AGP card in it. Replaced PII 350 or 400 to PIII 550. Not quite stable on 98SE as we need it to serve database using service plus software. This little known software which is a shop facing software that keeps all the customer's details, repair status, parts tracking, and ticket number that we place on each item for repair. And drive 2 printers.

Ended up replacing few years later with XP on a new PC (low end) running same service plus software. This improved the reliability so much and allowed us to drive 3 printers, two printer (parallel for dot matrix to print multi-copies paper and USB laser). Third parallel printer is driven by front computer (reliable windows 98SE computer) at the customer desk also connecting to this service plus via shared drives.

Eventually I converted all the computers to XP with newer hardware, latest was Core2 duo HP computer on XP for my co-worker's except the front computer stayed same with windows 98SE all the way to around 2011 when we closed up the shop for good. Boss's got the IBM netvista using PIII desktop computer running XP. Very reliable after replacing the old PC.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2024-01-12, 00:52:

Back in the day, that was 2003 I was a TV tech repair person at point of hire date, they were running unreliable, slow computers […]
Show full quote

Back in the day, that was 2003 I was a TV tech repair person at point of hire date, they were running unreliable, slow computers on 98SE, I picked up a Deskpro 2000 or 4000, this is a desktop with odd AGP card in it. Replaced PII 350 or 400 to PIII 550. Not quite stable on 98SE as we need it to serve database using service plus software. This little known software which is a shop facing software that keeps all the customer's details, repair status, parts tracking, and ticket number that we place on each item for repair. And drive 2 printers.

Ended up replacing few years later with XP on a new PC (low end) running same service plus software. This improved the reliability so much and allowed us to drive 3 printers, two printer (parallel for dot matrix to print multi-copies paper and USB laser). Third parallel printer is driven by front computer (reliable windows 98SE computer) at the customer desk also connecting to this service plus via shared drives.

Eventually I converted all the computers to XP with newer hardware, latest was Core2 duo HP computer on XP for my co-worker's except the front computer stayed same with windows 98SE all the way to around 2011 when we closed up the shop for good. Boss's got the IBM netvista using PIII desktop computer running XP. Very reliable after replacing the old PC.

Cheers,

Sounds like a Deskpro 4000, and having a PIII on a 440LX chipset is not supported. It might work, but you might get the instability issues you described.

Of course, there's also the matter of the OS: Windows 9x was never going to be as stable as NT-based systems like XP. Early XP was a mixed bag, used a lot more resources than 2000 which had matured by then and had SP4 if I'm not mistaken, a lot of people were badmouthing it for running slow on their old computers. But it was better received once they upgraded.

Ok, the gut shots I promised.

Before:

After: