HP Pavilion 6630   

The HP Pavilion 6630 is a low end machine (as of March 2000) with 64 meg of ram, but no dedicated video ram. It has a 10 gig hard disk, a Celeron running at 500 MHz and came with Windows 98 Second Edition. 

March 20, 2000 

Someone I know lent me their new HP Pavilion 6630 computer so that I could install software on it for a free ISP. The machine was only a few days old and no one had installed any new programs on it when I first saw it.

It took a loooong time to boot up. Turns out the list of programs automatically started at boot time was as long as your arm. The system tray was as crowded as a New York City subway in rush hour. I deleted some of the auto-started programs, but even after this pruning, there is still a long list of programs active after the system boots (as reported by control-alt-delete).

No Netscape. Netscape Communicator is not pre-installed on computer. The browser wars are over indeed.

AOL and CompuServe are really in your face. They are on the desktop, on the START menu, on the quick launch toolbar and also in the system tray. Of course, you can also find them the brute force way, with START ==> PROGRAMS.  

The computer comes with its own built-in commercials. Every now and then a window pops up on the desktop for "Financial planning and your taxes". I closed it immediately every time, so I'm not sure what product(s) its for. I also didn't use it long enough to ascertain just what the schedule of commercials is.

There was no ZIP program pre-installed. There are ZIP files on the machine and double-clicking on them results in the Windows prompt asking you what program should be used to open the file.

Adobe Acrobat was also not pre-installed. Microsoft Works, which is pre-installed, comes with a manual in Acrobat format. Considering that the Adobe Acrobat reader is free, this is really puzzling. Even without the Works manual requiring it, its such a popular file format that new computers should come with the Acrobat reader pre-installed.

I set up the task bar to always be on top and not to auto-hide (right click on the task bar and pull up the properties). This used to result in the taskbar being always visible. Despite this, Internet Explorer v5 sometimes hides the task bar.

Speaking of IE5, on this machine it came with the Yahoo companion pre-installed. This was my first exposure to the Yahoo companion, a toolbar that automatically appears under the address bar. It seemed to only work while online, viewing offline web pages did not cause it to appear. However, it pops up no matter where you go on the Internet which I found annoying. I can see it being a useful thing while on the Yahoo web site, but everywhere was a bit much. Fortunately, there is an option to un-install it. 

June 1, 2000

I spoke to the owner of this pc for an update. He has been having problems with it freezing up. I don't know the exact details, but he says that to get the computer to re-boot he has to unplug it from the wall, wait a bit, then plug it in. I have had the same experience with another HP Pavilion computer that will be added here soon. 

April 2001

The owner of this computer gave it back to me because it would not boot up. He admitted to being a pc novice and feared that he had deleted something by mistake. The machine started to boot, you saw the Windows 98 splash screen and that was it. After a while the screen went blank and the  monitor went into sleep mode, indicating the computer was no longer sending a video signal. 

The machine could boot to safe mode and after trying a few things, what worked was removing two disabled devices (a video driver and a standard keyboard) from device manager. However, even though it boots to Windows 98SE, its slow. Very slow. Brutally slow. It takes almost 10 seconds to open Windows Explorer. I took 20 seconds to open My Computer. System Monitor shows that the reason it is slow is that the cpu is busy. Even with nothing else running (except System Monitor) the cpu is 35 percent busy. See my Windows 98 gripes for more on this problem with the OS. 

FYI: A reader of this site named John, wrote that he also experienced CPU running at 40% with no programs running and that moving the mouse dropped the cpu usage to less than 5%. John thinks this is an HP problem because he has observed it with many HP Vectras (PIII 500s) and Kayaks running Windows 98. He tried updating the BIOS, re-installing Windows 98 and updating drivers, all to no effect. December 21, 2001. 

After playing with Windows 98 on this machine, I decided to use the first HP recovery CD (it ships with 2 different recovery CDs) to restore the computer to its new state, the way HP shipped it. There are two choices with the recovery CD, restore and restore and format. I opted for restore, which from the description seemed like it would restore all the files that make up Windows 98. The advantage of this option is that it leaves your existing data files.  

Of course, the recovery CD did not work. As soon as I clicked on the button to restore the system, the computer hung. I waited about a half hour, but it was dead. Turned off the computer, restarted and did it again. It hung again. The recovery program was version 1.2.3.6 from 1999. 

The second recovery CD worked, but it only lets you recover drivers and this did not fix my problem. 

I looked at the HP web site for this machine and sure enough, there is a long item about problems with the recovery CD. It does not however say whether it refers to recovery CD number 1 or number 2. It lists two possible reasons for the recovery to hang. Neither seemed to apply to me. The first blamed the hang on Windows 98 and dblspace. However, I never invoked Windows 98, instead I booted from the recovery CD. The other problem said to insert the second recovery CD when prompted. This computer hung, it never prompted for anything. I checked the online HP bulletin board for technical support. Quite a few people seem to have also experienced a system hang when trying to restore from the recovery CD. 

I also looked into upgrading the BIOS on this machine. On the HP web site there are two BIOS upgrades, but neither is for a Phoenix BIOS which the machine has. Did the Phoenix company rename itself or is this a mistake? Beats me. The machine has a Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0 according to the messages it displays at boot time when you tell the BIOS not to display the HP logo at boot time. The BIOS setup program says the core version is 4.06 and the BIOS revision is 1.06 from 11/15/99. 

I wrote to HP asking about this (April 26, 2001) and they responded quickly, saying  "the BIOS update is for your computer". They provided instructions for checking the current BIOS version which said to go to the main menu of the BIOS setup program. Specifically it said: 
      The BIOS revision is listed on the Main menu. Make note of the current BIOS version, you will 
     need this information to determine if a newer revision is available. 

The above refers to a "revision", then a "version" then a "revision". I gripe about this because the BIOS main menu has a "core version" and a "revision" and they are not the same. I again wrote to HP and they again responded quickly. They said to go look at this web page. It says to use the BIOS revision. This page also has much more detail about upgrading the BIOS. I have no gripe with the information on this page. However, I should have been able to find this web page on my own, but it was not linked to from the Drivers and Downloads page that linked to the BIOS upgrade. 

In the end, it turned out that the reason the computer was no brutally slow was that the hard disk was bad. It was not completely dead, but the testing application from the hard disk vendor reported errors. Other hard disk testing programs also reported assorted problems. The hard disk vendor offered to replace the hard disk. 

 FYI:  A reader of this web site wrote to share his experiences with upgrading the BIOS on this machine. He found a BIOS update at:
www.hp.com/cposupport/personal_computing/support_doc/bph06721.html 
The name of the download file is COG_209.EXE and it's for a long list of HP models. The BIOS is version 2.09 from April 15, 2001. After flashing (updating) the BIOS, the BIOS setup screen asked for a password and the instructions had not said anything about needing a password. To fix this he cleared the CMOS using a reset jumper on the motherboard. I have not tried this. August 22, 2001.