Great Laptop When It Works Correctly
Written: Mar 13 '02
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Pros: Sleek design, Bright Display, Fast
Cons: Lots of glitches after warranty ran out
The Bottom Line: Fast, durable, stylish, a great deal for students. Not good with gaming, however.
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| korree's Full Review: Compaq Presario 14XL345 (B12291-007) PC Notebook |
I began the summer knowing what I wanted to do with my free time: Get a job and buy a laptop for the next school year. After much research I finally decided on the Compaq 14xl series, specifically the 14xl345. I decided on this for many reasons. I especially liked the large 13.3” TFT LCD display. The DVD Rom drive and the video out would be an excellent combo for watching movies and doing presentations on the TV. Lastly, the 650 Mhz PIII processor and 10gb Hard Drive would me more than enough for my needs.
When payday came around and I had enough money to buy the laptop, I did so promptly. I ordered it off line, refurbished, for approximately $1200. It arrived in perfect condition except for one major noticeable defect. The LCD screen had a red line running through it, but after about an hour of being on it went away never to return. There are only 4 other problems I’ve had with the laptop:
+64 MB of RAM: This is just not enough, however, it’s easily fixable. Just pop out the panel on the underside and buy a stick of laptop memory. I bought 256 MB for a total of 312. However, the 8mb video card shares its memory with the system memory, so in actuality I’m running on 304 MB of ram. This shared architecture causes slow down in the ram, plus 8 MB isn’t that much to begin with, so don’t expect much gaming power out of it.
+Stuck with ME: It came preinstalled with ME and after various attempts of trying to install others (XP, 98, 2000, Linux, even Be) I could not. I kept receiving memory errors with all of them except ME. After reformatting I had to buy a $10 CD from Compaq to get ME back on my system. A scam if you ask me.
+10mbit e: Even though the built in Ethernet card is 100mbit it will not run at 100mbit. I’ve tried so hard to get it to run at that speed but it only works with 10mbit.
+Hard Drive Failure: After my various attempts at installing a new OS I found that I had trouble with installing things. I kept receiving write errors on my HDD. I’m sending it in to get fixed.
Even after considering these faults, the Compaq 14xl345 is still a great laptop for school use. It’s relatively cheap, and has a lot of memory, speed, and hard drive space. The DVD and TV out was definitely the selling point for this notebook for me. I would definitely recommend it to a friend or anyone else. Just watch out for that Compaq tech support.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1199
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 601-700
Screen Size: 13
RAM: 64
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
korree
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Location: Doylestown
Reviews written: 9
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
Sixteen year old into everything computers.
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