compaq

First of all, I was in the market for a widescreen laptop, so other widescreen laptops were the only ones I compared this to. Second, I bought X1030US refurbished direct from HP Shopping.

Overall, the laptop has a very appealing design and is right up there with other laptops in style, such as the Sony line of laptops. The widescreen display is just candy for your eyes and great for many applications, especially browsing the internet.

The system specs were plenty for my taste, enought to do everyday activities and once in a while a strenuous one, like play games, run CPU taxing programs etc. The HDD size is plenty, though you really only get around 33gb after the OS is installed and etc.

I have not yet ran the computer off the AC adaptor, but the few times I did take it off the power, I really like the feature that tells you (approx.) how much time you have left to run the laptop on the battery. The battery life is great compared to my last laptop. It seems to calculate to over 4+ hours.

Another great feature that I love is the wireless internet. However, it does some weird things when I turn the wireless off and then back on. It finds my network, but won't connect. I just restart the laptop which isn't a big deal. I leave the wireless on most of the time anyway. The button to turn it off and on is a great feature as well.

The feature that I must say I like is the fact that the fan, about 90% of the time, does not come on! My last laptop ran the fan all the time, but this laptop apparently can handle it without running. It's so quiet I don't know if it's on or not. It also usually runs only at around 600Mhz. I rarely see it reach the 1.4Ghz mark. The firewire port is a handy feature, but I really wished they included the 6-pin style rather than the 4-pin. I would really like to try out the infrared port too.

So far I have been very impressed with Compaq's laptop. It's thin, lighter than my old laptop (Gateway 400 series) and it's amazing because it's bigger than that laptop. The speakers are not too good, but it's tolerable. Of course you're not going to get Klipsche quality speakers, but they do their job.

The only other problem I've had is that I haven't been able to burn a CD on the laptop yet. It does have a CD-RW drive, but my software doesn't recognize the drive. I have used Easy CD Creator and Nero, but it can't find my drive. Strange.

One last pet peeve are the stickers that come on the laptop. :) I've tried to get a couple of them off, but they just won't come off!

Overall, you can't beat what you get for the price. I've compared it to the Dell Inpiron 8600, eMachines, HP, and Gateway and the only other close competitor for me were the widescreen series for Gateway. The lower price pulled me to this laptop and I don't regret it!

An Amazing machine, yet again by HP/Compaq, keeping their credibilty at its peak. A user friendly, fully integrated and a robust machine with everything you need for personal computing. As I said earlier, A Perfect Machine !!

This is hands down the best computer i have ever had. The only weakness is the 40 gig hd but a 60 or 80 was too much money. This computer owned my desktop P4@2.0ghz in everything i have done so far. I LOVE COMPAQ/HP heeh. This computer PWNS