Compaq Presario 2584

Specifications:

Intel Pentium 4 2.6GHz
256MB DDRAM
60GB Hard Disk
ATI Mobility Radeon M6
8x8x24x8x CDRW-DVD
V.92Modem;10/100LAN
15” XGA TFT
Windows XP Home


Review:

The compaq presario 2584 that i'm using at office is the second laptop that i was able to get my hands on to. my officemates keep trying to warn me before that compaq laptops break down easily and support is unreliable, but after three months of using it, nothing yet has gone seriously wrong.

when i first turned the laptop on, i was impressed by the blue colored LEDs. they really look cool. one thing that i also like is the touchpad on/off button that lets you disable the touchpad when you're not using it. the laptop also has shortcut buttons for mail, search, web browser, lock screen, and help. the 15 inch screen's display is quite clear and sharp, but there are times when i think that the full brightness is not enough. the thing that i don't like much is the keyboard. the buttons are a little bit hard to press.

i repartitioned the hard disk,which was installed with windows xp home, and installed windows xp pro and mandrake linux 10 official release. windows xp pro works just fine and i had blue screens only once or twice. windows applications run quite faster compared to the previous laptop that i was using.

the installation of mandrake linux 10 did not go as smooth as it should be. the laptop hangs at the start of the installation process. to deal with this, you need to choose "F1 for more options" during the installation prompt. then type the ff:

linux noauto nofirewire

after the installation process, my usb mouse did not work. to fix this, i installed the packages acpi and acpid and added the ff kernel options in my lilo.conf:

acpi=on apm=off

after encountering and fixing the above problems with mandrake linux 10, things went better. mandrake linux 10 runs quite well. i can play multimedia files with xmms and mplayer. applications run just fine.

the laptop itself is quite big and heavy compared to the ones used by my officemates. because of its weight, i was a little bit uncomfortable before when i carry it in my backpack, but i got used to it.

as a whole, i can say that i am satisfied with my laptop.