Compaq smacks back with the Evo 1000C
Written: Mar 04 '03
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Pros: DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive; good for 3D gaming; USB 2.0 connectivity, large LCD screen.
Cons: Low battery time; quite heavy.
The Bottom Line: For it's price, you'd be hard-pressed to do better.
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| ozgamer's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Compaq Evo Notebook N1000c (470040... |
The company may not exist in it's own entity but the brand is still alive and kicking as the Evo N1000C attests. Despite it's box-like design, it sports a big 15-inch (14.1 -inch viewable) LCD screen with an excellent 1600 x 1200 pixel (SXGA) resolution, ideal for CAD (computer-aided design-drafting)
With ATI's mobility Radeon 7500 graphics processor driving it, the N1000C is equally good at handling 3D games. It is built around Intel's 1.8GHZ Pentium 4-M processor plus 256Mb of memory - a good choice and a compromise between the slower 1.6GHz Pentium 4-M and the battery-guzzling 2GHz Pentium 4-M Intel.
Throw in Microsoft's Windows XP Professional operating system and this should be ideal for small business or corporate use. But of course, there's more to a notebook computer than just the processor and screen.
Compaq has added in a roomy 40Gb hard disk drive plus a DVD-ROM, CD-RW combo drive to give you plenty of storage options. A built-in V.92 modem and Fast Ethernet connectivity also lend wait to the business feel. However, labelling a notebook "deigned for business" often seems like code for saying it's pretty much hopeless for anything else - but don't get that idea of this notebook. You get a good feel for it by just looking at its peripheral connectivity options.
The modem and Ethernet we've talked but add in S-Video input and IEEE1394 (FireWire) and you've got the makings of an excellent portable digital video studio. The S-Video output also allows you to connect the notebook to your TV set (using an S-Video to composite video converter in most cases) and watch DVD movies. But the most impressive feature is the USB 2.0 connectivity as this is the first notebook I've seen to support this high-speed serial bus.
USB 2.0 is very likely to take over from FireWire as the high-speed peripheral port of choice not only for scanners and external hard disk drives but for digital videos as well because of its cheaper implementation costs. That makes its choice here a good one.
Although the Pentium 4-M chews through batteries faster than any other mobile processor I’ve seen, it is not especially bad either. It's been well documented that the Pentium 4-M is a bit of a disappointment when it comes to office applications, showing no real benefits over the Pentium III-M chip. However, on multimedia applications, the N1000C does show an improvement but it's only 11% faster than IBM's 1.13GHz Pentium-M powered ThinkPad X24. Compared with other similar notebooks such as IBM's 1.8 GHz Pentium 4-M powered ThinkPad T30, its multimedia performance is almost identical
But it's the after-hours entertainment where the mobile Radeon 7500 lets loose. I tested it with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, returning a very healthy 115 frames per second (fps) on our demo test at 640 x 480-pixel resolution. Performance does die away the higher up you go in resolution but even at 1280 x 1024-pixels, 32-bit color resolution, it's still a healthy 55 fps.
All up, the Evo N1000C is one of the best combinations of features and price I've seen for some time. From it's processor and LCD screen to its peripheral connections and storage options, the N1000C is hard to fault. If it has faults, one would be its 3kg weight but even that is still quite reasonable compared with some Pentium 4-M bricks I've seen.
It's battery life would likely be another but if you're looking at Pentium 4-M notebooks, unfortunately 3 hours is a good as you'll get.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 2100
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40
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ozgamer
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Member: Setzer
Reviews written: 60
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