The Compaq Presario line of machines has been around for years (since 1993 actually) and has a reputation as a solid brand name. The deftly named CQ60-313SA is one of the newer additions to this family. For under £400 HP/Compaq is offering a dual core machine with 3GB of memory, the question is, can it be trusted?
HP bought Compaq about 7 years ago but HP chose to keep the familiar Compaq brand name alive and kicking. HP has a very popular line of laptops in its Pavilion range but the Compaq side of the company also makes laptops and in this case the Presario CQ60.
If you look at the bare numbers the Compaq Presario CQ60-313SA is a good laptop. It comes with an AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core Processor running at 2.1 GHz, 3GB of memory, a reasonable (but not large) 160 GB hard drive, a Lightscribe Super Multi DVD Writer (+/-R +/-RW) with Double Layer support and Windows Vista.
There are also other pluses for the CQ60 including its quite nice 15.6-inch (1366 x 768) widescreen panel which has a 16:9 aspect so that you can watch widescreen movies without those annoying black borders at the top and bottom. The laptop also includes a number pad which is quite rare on laptops, so if you are used to entering large volumes of numbers via the number pad then the CQ60 could be a good choice.
The battery life isn’t wonderful on the CQ60 but neither is it bad considering the power of this laptop. You will get about 2.5 hours usage from the battery and may be able to tweak it up to 3 hours with careful use which is OK for those short trips or meetings when you can’t plug in the power. Also it is a little on the heavy side weighing 3kg. But of course these terms are all relative nowadays, we have laptops, notebooks, netbooks, ultra-portables, the list goes on. But looking at other laptops, the Mac Book air doesn’t even weight half of that of the CQ60 and has a 5 hours battery life, but at the same time costs a lot more.
The multimedia capabilities of the Compaq CQ60 are good as it includes an integrated nVidia GeForce 8200M video chipset (compared to the Intel 940 chip which many laptops have) which makes it capable of reasonable 3D graphics and can play 3D games well enough. This laptop also has Altec Lansing speakers and a HDMI port (as well as the standard VGA) and so lets you connect it to a high-deï¬nition (HD) TV.
Once downside is the inclusion of Vista Home Basic which is an odd choice considering the nVidia chip and the 3GB of memory. This machine would run Vista Ultimate easily enough and should really come with Home Premium and the nicer Aero interface. But also Windows 7 is coming out in just a few months and an upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium would be the order of the day.
The CQ60-313SA includes all the other bells and whistles that you would expect from a laptop of this class like WiFi and an integrated web cam and it costs just £399 including VAT.