Compaq Presario 5000 and DVD drive

My dentist wanted a computer just to put a slide show of his photos for his waiting patients.  He got a long VGA cable to connect the computer to the flat sceen TV (Dynex 32").  The problem is that it wouldn't fit.  One connector was male and the other was female.  But then it turned out that there was included adapter to turn the female into male, so no problem.

So I hooked up his new Windows 7 computer which I had set up at home on my LCD monitor (instead of using the picture screensaver I used Windows 7's feature of rotating the desktop background).

All seemed well as it was booting up.  But then the picture went blank.  It seemed the the Windows 7 was kicking into a video mode that the TV couldn't handle.  It's definitely a problem with the computer.  As I hooked up and old laptop and even his DOS computer running his dental software and the picture appeared.

One possible solution would be update the video driver.  But why waste a new computer for such a routine task.

Hey let me try this old Compaq Presario 5000 that my uncle gave me since they were going to throw it away.  They removed the hard drive, so I put in an old 3 GB hard drive.  And what do you know, the thing booted up Windows ME and installed most of the drivers.  Even the video driver and network adapter.

I hooked it up to my router and could connect to the internet.  But Internet Explorer kept crashing with an error.  Maybe because it's version 5.  Well, it's not supposed to be an internet computer anyway.

Luckily Windows ME supports flash drives.  So I put in the flash drive with the photos.  At first it didn't seem to recognize it. Uh oh.  But a few minutes later, suddenly the drive started installing.  And I was able to copy the pictures over.  And the slideshow was working.

I even hooked it up to my 42" plasma and it seems to be OK.  Disappointingly the picture on my 720p screen didn't turn out as crisp as I would like it to be with the VGA connection.  But I guess it's ok for video at a distance.

Next I wondered if I could watch DVDs on it.  Unfortunately the DVD drive (and the CD drive) doesn't open.  So let me see if I can replace it.

The problem is how to get them out.  The Compaq Presario 5000 has an oddball case that is tricky to open up.

I finally found this website that gave me the answer.  You have to open the lower front panel (just push it in and it should open).  Then pop off the upper front panel.  Then you can just pull out the drive from the front.

Unfortunately I didn't have any spare DVD drives lying around.  (Though I might have one or two in an old computer lying around.)  So I opened up the DVD case to see if there was a DVD in there before throwing away the drive.

Sure enough there was a broken belt.  I wondered how difficult it would be to replace the belt.  And looking at this video, I was suprised to see you can replace the belt with out opening the inside mechanism of the drive.

Now how do I get a replacement belt?  This site says you can use an o-ring, but they even tried a rubber band.  OK I got plenty of them.  Now let's see if this guy works.

Put in the drive and a new mouse (I want to keep the good mouse).  Power up.  Nope drive don't open.  And now not getting any video :(