gotta love the power
Written: Apr 29 '03
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Pros: power house in a sleek design
Cons: 15 inch display is nearly to big for the backpack
The Bottom Line: a very nice machine, I will take two.
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| wretchheathen's Full Review: Compaq Presario 2800US PIII-M 1.4GHz / 30GB / 512M... |
the case:
pretty silver exterior case and black matte with silver accents work area are very pretty. the outer silver case is fair as far as durability. it scratches easily and is showing wear after 2 months of hard use. I rate the case an 8 out of 10.
the WAN:
the wireless network is a better design than using a pc card and in that frame of reference, it is a better design, but it still has had a couple of issues where it has become separated from the connection and I have had to detach and reattach it to get good contact. I have found that the signal is not as good as expected, I can get strong signal, move 2 feet and have no signal at all, within 50 feet of the transmitter. I rate that an 8 out of 10.
the multimedia drive:
the dvd/cdrom drive will pop open without a moments hesitation, without touching the door with any deliberateness. I have had it on a soft surface, and it has 'just popped open', with a disk in, that is annoying if you are using the disk and just as annoying if you are not and it re-reads the disk each time. it failed to read a new rewriteable DVD, that was annoying, I would have expected such a new model to be able to do that. I have not used the rewritable DVD in it yet, but my husband has and he found it to be perfectly acceptable. I give it a 7 out of 10.
pc card drive:
that was easy to install the Kodak picture card adapter and effortless to work with. that makes transferring Megabytes and Megabytes of files very fast and effortless. drag and drop makes me very happy. definitely a 10 out of 10.
LCD display:
very very nice. the color is wonderful. the refresh rate is very good. the 2.2GHz mobile Pentium 4-M processor and ATI's Radeon 9000 graphics chip are hard at work here and I am tickled to death with them. light.. oh.. the brightness is one of my favorite things. I love have a very bright LCD and this one definitely answers the call of the wild. frequently my husband turns it down, he likes low level light and thinks that it helps on the battery. absolutely 10 out of 10
keyboard:
okay. couple of issues here. the keys are on a nice responsive rubber grommet that has a great feel. they are black matte so they are very pleasant. durable they are not. I have had the shift key crack in half (some serious help from a precocious toddler) but the point of contention is the touch pad. I will admit before hand that I am a stick kind of girl. I am not thrilled with the touchpad, when they first came out some years ago, I though 'wow' and 'cool' and 'neat' but when it comes to actually working... well. hhhrruummpphh. Compaq has had issues with floating pointers for some years (7 that I know from first hand knowledge) and so far this model has not exhibited that irritating floating pointer YET. what is bugging the dickens out of me, and I have looked at the sensitivity of the device is that it does not respond well to the two finger approach of 'mousing'. as long as you keep your fingers in their designated area, one on the touch pad, one on the button, the machine has no problem complying. if you have drifting fingers or just large clumsy fingers, this touch pad is not forgiving. and it will try to comply with both fingers. not a design flaw, just my own personal issue. many times I have been moving the pointer and ended up selecting and dragging a range of folders and files and dropped them in a different folder and I have no idea where they went. so if you are a stick pointer control type person, this may drive you just a bit crazy. 6 out of 10 is my opinion.
battery life:
a very nice response on this. I can see a generous 4 - 6 hours between charges, extremely nice in the objective of a portable, leaving the power outlets behind. 10 out of 10
software crashes:
I am running XP and it is reliable and stable. I have had more issues with this than with WIN2K but all in all it is stable enough and I would rank it 9 out of 10, had it come loaded with WIN2K I would feel that it would have ranked 10 out of 10.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 3200.00
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 15 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30
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Epinions.com ID:
wretchheathen
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Member: Katherine Mom of 5
Location: Houston, Texas, USA
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
It is all about price, performance, comfort, and safety. Value is the bottom line.
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