$600 Notebook Roundup - Crowning the Affordability King

The display on the V2000 and V2000Z is basically identical to what Gateway uses on the NX200S; it's a 12.1" WXGA panel (1280 x 768 native resolution).  While it doesn't get nearly as bright as the Dell's panel, the Compaqs are decent. 

The M2000Z features a 14.1" XGA (1024 x 768 native resolution) panel, much like the Dell, but with no where near the brightness capability. 

Just like Dell, Compaq stuck the function key between the left CTRL and Windows keys, but Compaq has a keyboard that's spread out a little better than the Inspiron's - much like Gateway's, so typing is quite natural. 

The keys themselves are probably the noisiest out of the lot, with the Dell being the quietest and the Gateway falling in the middle.

The trackpad on all three Compaqs is pretty nice mainly for their inclusion of a disable button right above the trackpad itself.  You simply hit the button, which has its own LED, and the trackpad is instantly disabled. Hit it again to re-enable it.  The trackpad has both horizontal and vertical scroll areas, which work just the way that you would expect.  The vertical scroll area is obviously the most useful of the two, but it never hurts to have easy access to a virtual horizontal scroll wheel as well. 

The wireless NIC has a dedicated on/off button, similar to the trackpad, at the top of the keyboard to the left of the power button.  A dedicated wireless NIC button is great for quickly disabling the wireless NIC when not in use, thus conserving battery power.  To the right of the power button, you have three audio buttons for volume down, up and mute.  If you've ever accidentally forgotten to turn off or turn down your audio, nothing is more useful than having quick access to buttons that will silence the situation.

A single button to disable the wireless network adapter

And easy to access audio control buttons

Once again, like the other notebooks in the roundup, the Compaqs were fairly quiet and didn't put off much heat at all.  The base of the notebooks did get warm, but keeping them on your lap won't make you uncomfortable. 

The Compaqs performed reasonably in our tests as you will soon see, but interestingly enough, they all performed very similarly - despite the fact that two of the notebooks used Celeron M 1.4GHz processors while the other used a Sempron 2800+.  The most interesting item?  The V2000 Celeron M notebook offered significantly better battery life than its Sempron counterpart, the V2000Z, in all aspects.  We were particularly shocked in how much better the V2000 did in the wireless web browsing tests when compared to the V2000Z.  The same performance, but significantly better battery life?  We at least found which of the three Compaqs that you should choose.