My New Laptop

Published on November 7, 2006 By Xythe In Blogging

As some of you recall, I mentioned Walmart advertised A Compaq Presario notebook for $398 Link

Well, I made it to one of my local Walmarts around 9:45pm, where I was 3rd in line to recieve one of the 20 laptops available. Like any geek, I had to hold off from speeding home to play with my new toy

Anyways, unpacked it from the box, popped in the battery, and powered up. It took a couple of hours to set up, and another hour of basic standard tweaking, and I was in business.

So far I'm fairly impressed with my new Presario. It's really nothing special, but it's not really intended to perform any special tasks. This is my simple back-up PC and replaces my quite outdated P II 300MHz Thinkpad.

As usual, this unit comes with the minimum RAM to operate, but hey, what do you expect for $400? Anyway, I'm waiting for another 512Mb RAM before I can really do much more. WindowBlinds and Right-click would most likely consume a good chunk of the 140Mb free memory, and I don't even want to attempt loading ZoneAlarm and my antivirus software before the upgrade.

Gideon had mentioned the support with Dell would be far better than it is with Compaq. This was very true. The compaq itself came with very little in the way of documentation. The online help is fairly limited as well, and not to easy to find.

I opened a chat with a Compaq so called technician. I asked for the specifications for the RAM that was installed. I know we had PC2700 SODIMM, as any idiot can use Windows to tell them this. What I really wanted was the voltage and CAS timing specs, so I could by some decent aftermarket (Corsair) RAM vs the expensive, crappy RAM offered by HP.

She asked first for the model number, then the serial number (which of course is on the bottom of the machine I was using). I gave her that. Then she wanted the part number of the PC. I was a little irritated that I had to go underneath the PC again. I did as she asked, and mentioned that Compaq already had that info from when I registered the product. She was snotty about it, and came back with some nasty little retort.

In the end, about 45 mins later, she found the info I needed, which by that time I had found for myself via independant web sites.

Conclusion, Compaq Support does indeed suck, as Gideon had warned. Good thing I dont really need them, but the test was fun.

Overall, as things stand now, I'm very satisfied with this new laptop for $400, as it suits my needs well. It will suit them even better after a RAM upgrade. Its pretty snappy for common tasks and runs Windows Media Edition very well. IMHO, Walmart and Compaq have put a very reasonable product together for the average consumer.

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