UtterlyBoring.com is produced by Jake Ortman (e-mail, resume), a 30-year-old dad, percussionist, freelance Web designer, consultant and jack-of-all-trades computer geek, living in Bend, Oregon. He created this so that his expensive journalism and technology degree isn't getting totally wasted. In addition to editing this site in his free time, he is the IT Director and Ad Designer at both Sunray and Discover Sunriver. He has LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook profiles if you're trying to stalk him.
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If you're reading this, you have too much time on your hands.
I have to deal with a bunch of HP and Compaq products at the office from their LaserJets and Deskjet printers to their Proliant servers as well as a few of their laptops and desktops. One of the ways I've found information was generally via Google, which has HPs IT Resource Forums and Business Support Forums indexed very well. The forums have always had a solution for the various problems I've had, usually there's been a forum post with a follow up that linked to an appropriate HP/Compaq support article or download page that will give me what I need.
The problem is that HP, in all their infinite wisdom, decided to restructure their support site, effectively killing all those pages that people in the forums linked to. So pages like this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this (among many others, these are just the ones I could find right now) no longer work. The reality is that Google is much better at finding answers in normal language than HP's own search engine, and clicking through the tons of various options that HP had to find information is a tedious process. There are just tons of dead links all over HP's site. Whoever the moron was at HP who decided it was a good idea to kill a ton of should-be-permanent links should lose their job.
But for my future reference, since I've been dealing with these a lot lately:
Proliant SmartStart 5.50 ISO. That's the version you want if you're planning on doing any work on older PII/PIII Proliant servers (like the ML370, DL360 or DL380 first generations, or any of the 800 or 1600 line). Newer versions don't support those older machines. If you're lucky enough to have a newer machine, newer versions can be found here, with 7.80 direct download here.
The Dren said on 09/29/08 @ 11:50 AM: Thanks, great resource, I've got a pretty good library of Smart Start CDs, but love having ISO files on my server in case of emergencies.