[CyberKarl]

HELP!!! Has anyone purchased any of the fine Debranded HP computers that "Computer Geeks" sells? There a real bargain. I've installed Win XP pro on one and it works great, except I cant get the sound working and other drivers are missing, i.e. USB2 Video, etc.
It would help if I knew the HP model number that the DeBranded PC was meant to be. I've written "Geeks.Com" to see if they know, no reply yet.
The PC is a P4 with a 3GHZ CPU, 160GB Drive and 1gig of ram. It also has a 16X DVD/RW deive as well as a floppy and a multi chip/USB panel on the front,
If anyone and help my with this I would greatly appreciate it.
Karl

PS im a newbie to this forum, so if I made any mistakes in protocol, please forgive me.

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Download everst from my signature and check to see what motherboard you have, from there you should be able to get drivers for almost everything. Not sure what a 'debranded' computer is. One that is built up?

[Adrenalin]

Download everst from my signature and check to see what motherboard you have, from there you should be able to get drivers for almost everything. Not sure what a 'debranded' computer is. One that is built up?

[CyberKarl]

You can go to "WWW.geeks.com" and search "HP DeBranded" , you'll see 8 or 10 brand new desktop pc's they sell very cheap. I think that they are newly manufactured pc's made by a company for HP, Due to ever changing specs HP decided not to sell these "Over-runs" and dumped a big load of these on the market to discount sellers such as Geeks.com. Before they did, however they erased the hard drive. Thus no drivers on the PC.
Karl

[joe.smetona]

Here is my suggestion.

1. Abandon XP completely. The amount of work and $$ to keep XP working is astounding, especially if you are supporting a dozen or more computers for friends and family. I've abandoned XP in favor of Linux Mint 9.

I have the same debranded HP computer you have and it is fantastic. I use the 64-bit version available from Linuxmint.com as a download to create a DVD installation disk. It installs in about 15 minutes and all of the drivers are found and installed.

The Open Office suite is included and it comes with Firefox and you can choose from over 30,000 free applications. OpenOffice creates, opens and saves in the Microsoft Formats if you like. (.doc, .xls, .mdb, .ppt)

My daughter just finished her first year of college. She has been using Linux Mint on her Notebook for 3 years without any difficulty. She uses OpenOffice for all of her assignments. For my part, I've had no maintenance and she has not used virus protection at all. She's never had a virus.

We also abandoned Windows on our two laptops and netbook in favor of Linux Mint.

Linux Mint has the necessary codecs pre-installed to play all Microsoft media and DVD's right after the install.

My family has been using Linux for 8 years and the family loves it. Virus protection is NOT needed and you never get viruses.

In your case, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a try. If you are using Windows to burn the .iso file, download ActiverIso Burner (free) and set it on 1X speed to burn the DVD.

I can't say enough good things about Linux Mint. - You just need to try it out.

[123Runner]

Download everst from my signature and check to see what motherboard you have, from there you should be able to get drivers for almost everything. Not sure what a 'debranded' computer is. One that is built up?

You only have Firefox as a link.

My signature has Everest. PC Wizard 2010 will also work and Belarc will give some also.

[Troy]

Try hitting up the HP support for driver downloads. There is an automatic program that can check your computer for you and let you know if there are any driver updates available. It might pick up this debranded machine?