All three of the notebooks share the same general port layout, which ends up being pretty decent although nothing particularly special.
At the front of the notebooks, you have:
- Microphone jack
- Headphone jack
On the right side of the notebooks:
- USB 2.0 port
- S-Video output
Moving onto the left side of the notebooks:
- VGA output
- Ethernet jack
- Modem jack
- USB 2.0 port
- PC Card slot
And finally at the rear, you have the power connector for the AC adapter:
Although all of the notebooks in this roundup felt relatively similar in terms of build quality, the Compaq notebooks offered the most rattles right out of the box. The culprit appears to be the hinges used to attach the display to the base of the notebook, which had far more play in them on these Compaq notebooks than on the Gateway and definitely more than on the Dell.
The top and bottom of the Presario notebooks is a matte black plastic, while the inside and outer edges are silver. While the black/silver color scheme can work, Compaq goes ahead and complicates it with a number of other colors or shades of silver. For starters, there are two shades of silver on the keyboard area itself. Then, you have the keyboard, which is this grey color that isn't aesthetically pleasing at all. Then there are the amber LEDs that Compaq uses everywhere; Compaq should know by now that amber LEDs aren't cool anymore. Even their wireless NIC LED is blue. Why couldn't the rest of the machine follow that trend? So, what you end up having is a notebook that is black, silver, "silver-er", grey, amber and neon blue.
The Compaq V2000
The Compaq M2000
The one design decision that Compaq did make good on was the styling of the exterior of the notebook. The rounded corners along the edges of the notebook are very well done, and the profile of the unit is quite modern. With the lid closed, the notebook has a very nice black/silver look, which is almost slimming - until you get an idea of how big these things are. They aren't of a desktop replacement size, but it's tough to actually keep the word "slimming" in the last sentence without cringing.
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rqle - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
Hmm, didnt know these littler celeron M 1.4ghz can pretty much outpace the new architecture of the sempron 2800+ cpu. interesting.Questar - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
How about an Inspiron 6000? I snagged one for $584 + $19 shipping.Questar - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
BTW, that was with a P-M, not a C-M.bjacobson - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
niceQuestar - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
Yeah, and now I see you can get a 600m for less than $600.Alphafox78 - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
I have a V2000Z with a Turion64 and its great!!! It sounds like the article is biased against compaq or something, the thing is sweet. works great in World of Warcraft and even plays BF2, althouh its not too fun. the form factor is great, I highly recommend it. mine does have the brightview screen, 1GB of PC3200 ram and a 5400rpm drive tho.. ;)SS - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
The point of this was for $600 range laptops, going with the Turion64 setup over the Sempron and upgrading the RAM and hard drive all would push the price well over the price point this review was for.So you are basically asking to rate the $600 laptop based off the $1400 model's preformance.
Alphafox78 - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
I got mine for $760 after tax. then the free buestbuy ram, used the HD from my old laptop. lower than $700 after the free ram and stuff. I didnt get it for $500, missed that offer by a week! arg!Hacp - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
Tell that to the people who got the Turion 64 V2000Zs with wireless/12cell for around 500 shipped taxed. Then add the free 1GB bestbuy ram.Hacp - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link
Ya if you can get it for under 450 taxed shipped of course its great :).Also to further my comments, I think this article really shows the strenght of the Intel centrino platform. In other tests with dedicated graphics cards, the Turion/sempron/ and Pentium M come really close in terms of battery life, but in this test, comparing the V2000 to the V2000Z, we see that the whole platform makes the celeron have much battery life, even though the sempron "should" have more Blife.