surreal1221
Golden Member
Alrighty, here are the specs.
Checkout w/ specs
I purchased it through their employee purchase program for Department of Defense employees. So if you are one of the lucky few, or hundreds unfortunately, that are employeed by the DoD, or any branch of the military or government, take advantage of their program. Saved around 25%.
Anyways, onward with the review.
From the get go I was concerned about portability, quality, etc. All the things you should be concerned with when dropping a substantial amount of money, even more so with myself as I have a wedding to take care of later this year, plus school. Compaq made it extremely easy for me to get the machine I wanted, at a price I could be pleased with.
The shipping was exceptional. I paid the extra 10$ for 2 day business, so when I got the tracking information on the 10th saying that it would be delivered on the 15th I was a little concerned. I let it ride yesterday, and then this morning after I got home from work I checked the tracking, and sure enough it went from China, to Paris France, to Columbia SC in about 28 hours. With that being said, I was throughly impressed that I wasn't going to have to call Compaq and b1tch about my extra 10 bones I spent on shipping. After I had some confidence it would arrive today I eventually made it to bed around 9am. Slept until 2pm'ish, and checked the tracking one more time to see if it had been delivered (I live in the dormintories on this base, so all packages, large mail, etc is sent to general delivery and individuals must pick it up themselves). Went and picked it up, brought it back to my place and opened it up. Machine was packed well, and have yet to find any imperfections that occured during production or shipping.
First thing I did was boot it up, do all their ghey setup stuff and then let it load up to the desktop. As you can tell by the specs it had XP Home on it. That quickly came off, but after I took care of a couple of other things. I turned the machine off, flipped it over, unsrewed the memory compartment door, and popped in another 512mb of memory I ordered earlier this week from newegg (mad props!). Rebooted, popped in my XP Pro corp disk, reformatted, did all the good things, and am finally sitting here using firefox running an ad-hoc wireless network.
I have in the past had trouble with laptop keyboards. I don't know what has happened, but this thing is excellent. Keys are nicely sized for my smaller than average hands. I don't use the touchpad as I purchased a microsoft wireless notebook optical mouse earlier in the week, once again in anticipation of getting the laptop, so in regards to the touchpad, I don't know nor do I care, lol.
I have yet to test out the graphics, dvd playback, or sound to a certain extent. MP3 playback so far has been fine and dandy with the stock altec lansing speakers, but use headphones I'm sure the quality will be better so long as you paid more than 30 dollars for the phones.
I'll have pictures in a couple of days, as well as putting a review up on notebookreview.com, as in my search for a machine I did not find a full review from them.
DISCLAIMER: Experience may vary, any typos found, stfu I'm not perfect. No cliffs either.
Checkout w/ specs
I purchased it through their employee purchase program for Department of Defense employees. So if you are one of the lucky few, or hundreds unfortunately, that are employeed by the DoD, or any branch of the military or government, take advantage of their program. Saved around 25%.
Anyways, onward with the review.
From the get go I was concerned about portability, quality, etc. All the things you should be concerned with when dropping a substantial amount of money, even more so with myself as I have a wedding to take care of later this year, plus school. Compaq made it extremely easy for me to get the machine I wanted, at a price I could be pleased with.
The shipping was exceptional. I paid the extra 10$ for 2 day business, so when I got the tracking information on the 10th saying that it would be delivered on the 15th I was a little concerned. I let it ride yesterday, and then this morning after I got home from work I checked the tracking, and sure enough it went from China, to Paris France, to Columbia SC in about 28 hours. With that being said, I was throughly impressed that I wasn't going to have to call Compaq and b1tch about my extra 10 bones I spent on shipping. After I had some confidence it would arrive today I eventually made it to bed around 9am. Slept until 2pm'ish, and checked the tracking one more time to see if it had been delivered (I live in the dormintories on this base, so all packages, large mail, etc is sent to general delivery and individuals must pick it up themselves). Went and picked it up, brought it back to my place and opened it up. Machine was packed well, and have yet to find any imperfections that occured during production or shipping.
First thing I did was boot it up, do all their ghey setup stuff and then let it load up to the desktop. As you can tell by the specs it had XP Home on it. That quickly came off, but after I took care of a couple of other things. I turned the machine off, flipped it over, unsrewed the memory compartment door, and popped in another 512mb of memory I ordered earlier this week from newegg (mad props!). Rebooted, popped in my XP Pro corp disk, reformatted, did all the good things, and am finally sitting here using firefox running an ad-hoc wireless network.
I have in the past had trouble with laptop keyboards. I don't know what has happened, but this thing is excellent. Keys are nicely sized for my smaller than average hands. I don't use the touchpad as I purchased a microsoft wireless notebook optical mouse earlier in the week, once again in anticipation of getting the laptop, so in regards to the touchpad, I don't know nor do I care, lol.
I have yet to test out the graphics, dvd playback, or sound to a certain extent. MP3 playback so far has been fine and dandy with the stock altec lansing speakers, but use headphones I'm sure the quality will be better so long as you paid more than 30 dollars for the phones.
I'll have pictures in a couple of days, as well as putting a review up on notebookreview.com, as in my search for a machine I did not find a full review from them.
DISCLAIMER: Experience may vary, any typos found, stfu I'm not perfect. No cliffs either.
