There are 434 different models of the Compaq Presario Laptop. Because of the wide sales and dispersion, there is a lot of experience with them. They have three main problems, besides inadequate memory:
hard drives fail early.
Screen inverters burn out early.
LCD problems with the screen and drivers are many.
Inadequate cooling because of poorly designed cooling channels.
First, download the latest driver set.
Second, upgrade the BIOS if it does not have the latest.
Third, clean out all the air channels as best you can using canned Dust Off, or other large can of Difluoroethane Gas cleaner. Do not use a vacuum cleaner or a blower, as they will generate way too much static electricity.
The machine was sold with 256 mb of memory. If it has not been upgraded to 512 or more, consider doing that... on up to the maximum of 1 GB in two 512 mb modules.
Yours must be about 4 years old. If so, the drive is probably gone... and possibly the LCD or the screen inverter.
Try installing a new hard drive. Pretty easy. One screw on most models. Then four screws to remove it from the caddy. You can find plenty of low cost hard drives at 40 GB, 60 GB, 80 GB, or 100 GB for $40 to $80... Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, or Fujitsu. We recommend Seagate, Toshiba, or Western Digital in that order, and would not recommend the Samsung, Hitachi, or Fujitsu.
Install the drive, being sure your jumper is set to MASTER. Then boot to the Compaq recovery disc that came with your computer.
You should be up and running in about 14 hours. You may be able to rescue the data from the hard drive, but placing the drive in a desktopy computer using an adapter, then drag and drove the Files from Documents and Settings, then use ABC Recovery from
www.majorgeeks.com to recover the Outlook Express email fails
Then, using Internet explorer, upgrade all your microsoft files to Internet Explorer 7, Media Player 11, DirectX 9c, and the Adobe files: Reader, Shockwave, Flash, and the other software you use.
Good luck. Let us know how it goes.