My rule of thumb for buying laptops (since the mid 2000s) has been that compaq is the bottom-rung cheap brand that should always be avoided. Not sure their survival has been a good thing.
In 2006, every single one of my coworkers bought a brand-new MacBook, and within a month every single one of my coworkers had a MacBook in the shop.
I bought a Compaq laptop with a 64-bit CPU for under $1000. It ran flawlessly for over a decade, needing only a new battery. I eventually gave it to my parents who still have it.
Brand necrophilia. Compaq consistently built better gear than HP before being absorbed. HP used that brand for their junk as a way of getting back at Compaq.
Wrong. Compaq had much higher DOA and other defects in the mid 90s. They relied on customer institutional memory from the 80s when they really were the best.
Counterpoint: my Compaq Presario 1210 survived for about 20 years before it finally stopped POSTing. Even the original hard drive still worked (albeit with a range of bad sectors around which I had to partition).
The consumer gear was trash. The server lines were an entirely different story. Also worth noting that by the mid 2000s, Compaq was just a branding on the consumer side. The hardware was all the same old HP consumer junk.
