You Get What You Pay For
Written: Mar 30 '01
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Pros: small, not cumbersome, and it always comes in handy
Cons: low battery life, gets hot, sometimes stutters when reading from a CD
The Bottom Line: If you're on a budget and need a laptop, a Compaq with a Celeron may just be for you.
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| fixxxerny's Full Review: Compaq Presario 12XL301 (199375-167) PC Notebook |
My Compaq is not the greatest laptop in the world, but it was cost effective for my life, which was the number one reason I purchased this model and not, say, some other company's product.
The screen is small, which has positives and negatives. The positive is, of course, that the entire machine is small and very easily transported. It's slightly heavier than I would like it to be, but it goes from place to place easily enough. The down side of the small screen is that your eyes will get killed if your resolution is anything less 600 x 600; and even at that resolution, you are taking a chance with your eyes.
In keeping with the size, the keyboard is more squished together than I would like it to be, and I must use the delete and backspace keys often due to stubby fingers smacking extra keys. Also keep in mind that this machine does not come with a mouse. It has a port in the back for one, but your primary means of mouse-dom are the touchpad located before the keyboard.
The battery on this product has a three-hour lifespan. I have yet to push it the entire way to three hours, primarily because one of the few times I was without a plug but with a freshly charged battery, it was on pace for two and a half hours of usage. Since the machine comes with a plug, if you are near an outlet, you will never have that great a problem.
The 5 GB hard drive is just that. 5 GB. You need to reserve a portion of it in case your machine goes into standby mode, and on my computer, the hard drive is partitioned into two unequal pieces, with the smaller piece acting as a back-up drive to the larger.
Also, I found on a few occasions that when playing a CD, either audio or data (in this case, data meaning a CD with MP3s on it), there was a stutter in the playback. I have not tested this with a regular CD (i.e. one I did not write myself), but I did notice it with writeable CDs which have no problems on other machines.
So now, if you're thinking "how can he like it if he keeps bad-mouthing it?", I shall continue and (hopefully) justify myself. I like the compact state of this machine. It is easy to take with you from place to place and has saved my backside on several occasions where I had to be somewhere, yet still had school work to do. As a college student, ANY laptop is a God-send.
Besides, this machine has a 533 MHZ Celeron (I believe it is 533, but I do not have the booklets in front of me) and with the standard 64 MB of RAM, I can write my reports and play The Sims if I so chose to.
The machine also has a 56K modem (with only one plug for a phone line -- this computer was not designed to be a primary-use computer) and comes with the twenty-eight standard ISPs so that you can either install your own or enroll in a new one. It also had a serial port, parallel port, and USB port (which is handy with my ZIP drive).
Ultimately, if you buy this laptop, you're getting the square root of a real computer. I don't go anywhere, not even to the library, without my electrical plug and the assurance that I can sit near an outlet. When five papers are due on Monday, two and a half hours will never be enough to research all of them. However, as a laptop, it is quicker and more efficient that writing notes out in longhand. And for a college student like myself, that's really all I could ask for in a laptop.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1200 w/ tax
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Celeron
Processor speed: 501-600
Screen Size: 12
RAM: 64
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): Under 4
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Epinions.com ID:
fixxxerny
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Member: Nick
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Reviews written: 206
Trusted by: 55 members
About Me:
college graduate/all-around know-it-all :)
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