It's so long ago (for reference we were seeing mostly 386 and 486 class machines) that I can't remember the specific model numbers of the Compaqs we were getting through the labs, but I will say in their defence that it was a relief, in terms of build quality and accessibility, to get a Compaq in front of you instead of the POSs that were being turned out by the likes of Gateway, and (worst of the worst) Amstrad.
Going to be honest, my father's OEM PC outfit turned out some reasonably nice bits of kit back then. Mostly proper Intel OEM boards, disks, quality cases and power supplies etc. None of that second rate AMD K5/6 shit (how times have changed
). BUT when it came to something slightly more industrial, Compaq and Dell won.
The best story I have to attest to Compaq not being shit was a job I got to set up a dialup router for a 3 person office (accountant). Fairly simple task so I grabbed a junker P90 compaq deskpro I had lifted from a skip, poked a hard disk in it and stuffed NetBSD on it. I set up a rexec script on each of their windows machines that would connect the dialup (to prevent false auto-dialouts and nasty phone bills) and another script to shut it down at 6pm if it hadn't timed out. Took about 3 hours to get it working and they were happy. Didn't hear anything for 7 years (this was 2006 by then) and then one day out of the blue I got a call asking me to come and fix it because it had broken. Figured why the hell not. Well it turned out that the dialup ISP they were using had shut their service down, NetBSD disk was full of logs and it had an uptime of over 5 years still. Hardware was 11 years old by then and I didn't fancy risking it further so I just pulled the power and replaced it with a ADSL connection and a Draytek router and got them an ADSL line in. They bought new PCs for themselves from Dell and I helped them migrate it over to something slightly more modern which didn't take a lot of effort and they were happy again.
I'm going non-Ferengi here but I've been doing hardware, ISP and software refreshes for them every 5 years since just because I actually enjoy working for them. Nice supply of biscuits, coffee and a good context switch away from the usual grind. I break even on the job. They are thoroughly competent power users as well and don't need to ask me questions every two minutes, just when they want to make big changes.
The only other "good" client I ever had was a company that made die cut sticky things. I wrote them an ERP system in Access (sorry!) that they ran their business off for years. That was of course until a change of management decided to pay someone lots of money to replace it with a web based system that never worked properly and ruined their business. I was asked to look at it and found the page hits were 1Mb a go (viewstate hell in asp.net), which was not good on 2004 Internet Explorer...
I need to write a book.