Oh lordy, that's abuse. Poor Compaq. Hope you can salvage at least something. The hard drive and mobo are probably damaged past repair, sadly. CRTs 500% bagel.

So luckily it wasn't coming with a hard drive or that would definitely be hosed. A more thorough inspection shows that the control board for the CRT has a Pot basically snapped in half having dropped the entire trim knob. I also noticed that the power button mechanism is physically jammed and won't depress. The motherboard and sound blaster however don't show any obvious signs of physical damage.

I think there's a good possibility the system itself might be salvageable. If that's the case the biggest problem here is that the motherboard connects to the monitor and power supply via a proprietary card edge connector. Video is no problem I can always just throw a video card in to get the output to another display. Power would be a little more tricky. I'd have to wire up an edge connector, or bypass it and feed power directly into the board nearby.

Of course the entire point of the Presario 400 series is the really cool all in one form factor. Maybe if i'm adventurous I'll try putting this thing back together and firing it up just to see what happens.

You should definitely report this to Fedex, this isn't something normal.

brian105 wrote on 2020-05-16, 05:44:

You should definitely report this to Fedex, this isn't something normal.

They won't care, because it's not their fault. You can clearly see on the third picture that the packaging was completely insufficient for shipping such a thing. Some bubble wrap and almost no clearance between the item and the box won't protect a heavy CRT+PC with an old, brittle plastic casing. It's always easy to blame the shipping company, but that packaging does not even adhere to the rules for packing non-fragile stuff.

I'll agree it should have been double boxed. The seller is dealing with Fedex over the damage trying to set up a claim. In the meantime I was refunded the purchase price. It's sad because these systems don't come up for sale too often, and when they do they're normally pretty expensive (300-500 + shipping). If nothing else I got a most likely working sound blaster pro 2, and a 486 sx25.

I had the same thing happen to me 4 years ago with a Macintosh Performa 580 for the same reason (severely insufficient packaging). I salvaged the drives and motherboard from it and scrapped the rest...good thing the 580 wasn't one of the models with a Trinitron CRT.