Parts Swap, Compaq to HP

A neighbor has an HP G71-445US that he took apart to upgrade, then just bought a new laptop instead and put this in a box. Everything is there except the processor, RAM, harddrive and battery. It does have a power cord that works. I have a Compaq C700 with a 1.47 GHz cpu, 2.5Gb of PC4200 RAM and 80Gb hd with a broken screen sitting in my closet. Can I install the cpu, RAM and hd from the Compaq into the HP to get this thing working? I'm on a tight budget and would rather spend the money on a good battery if it does work. The HP has an 800 MHz FSB, the Compaq is 533MHZ. Will that be a problem?

 

Memory: Both laptops use DDR2 so it should work. The Compaq memory will run slower in the HP since it is PC2-5300 vs PC2-6400.

Hard drive: Both are SATA-150 so you should be fine as long as the Compaq is not thicker.

CPU: This is where you might get tripped up. However, both are Socket P so it might work.

Give it a shot and good luck!

 

The parts went in and it seems to be working ok except for one small problem. It will not load either Windows XP Home or XP Pro. The blue screen error message comes up after Windows has finished loading the files for setup and says it's a corrupted hard drive. It will, however, load and run both 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04. Any suggestions?

 

No idea. Could be a missing driver of some sort.

 

Ordered the factory recovery software; loaded it and got a recovery failure error. Oh well, I'll keep Ubuntu on it; no problem.

 

The factory recovery software would be expecting the original parts. Likely one of the newer parts is causing the issue.

Ubuntu on it is fine. Better than nothing!

 

You can reinstall any os as long as you have the coa on the bottom of the computer. Doesn't matter if it's xp, vista or win7, if you have the coa you have a valid key to reload the software.

XP is very picky with hardware changes (going from one motherboard to another) and will throw a bsod if you attempt to load windows on a machine it wasn't originally installed on. Windows 7 is the least picky of the bunch but only works in similar chipsets.

Since the G71-445US model comes with windows 7 home premium you can just use the key on the bottom of the computer to reload it.

Here are some links to good image files that will allow you to make a windows 7 installation dvd.

You can activate with the key and everything, the motherboard hasn't changed so you shouldn't have a problem.

 

Final follow up. The laptop works just fine with the 1.47 cpu and RAM from the C700. I gave up on installing Win 7 and left Ubuntu 12.04 on it. I did get an 8800 mAh battery for it. I even managed to get rid of the remnants of the C700 to a guy needing a motherboard and keyboard.