Good all round budget machine. (Compaq Presario A935EA)

Member Name: KormaCurryNow

Product:	Compaq Presario A935EA
Date:	05/08/09 (35 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice screen & sound.

Disadvantages: No recovery media supplied

This laptop was bought to be a work from home computer with enough power to enable a few applications to be open at once (email, spreadsheet, word processing, etc) and have a large enough screen to be usable. It wins on all these counts. It has a bright sharp screen and its keyboard is very usable. It is just the right size to sit on the kitchen table and it is fairly silent most of the time. When you want to use if for leisure purposes the 17 inch screen hits the mark as it is still small enough to move it around the house and browse the internet on the arm of your sofa. It has all the standard features like usb, SD memory card reader, ethernet, 56k internal modem, DVD writer, keyboard PS2 socket, VGA output for an external monitor but no DVI digital output (this means you cannot watch HD content on your telly). The Altec Lansing speakers on this laptop are really impressive, they can be turned up quite loud and the distortion and vibration is minimal, all my previous laptops have been a real let down sound wise.

What I did not like about this computer was you had to burn your own restore disks (there is a recovery partition you can boot from in case your machine gets messed up), if you want you can buy a set of disks to perform a factory restore from HP. There was a lot of software included and it was able to be used just straight out of the box.

It come with Windows Vista but I have been dual booting it into Ubuntu Linux which I use for work purposes and it has been completely compatible with no problems, now I tend to use linux most of the time. When I used Vista I was impressed with the amount of free games which kept the children entertained for a while.

Overall a good all round laptop suitable for office and home use. It is just a little large and heavy for being a true mobile laptop for a people on the move. Battery life lasts for about an 1.5 hours under normal use. If you do take it out with you on the road you will probably need a new bag as it definitely foes not fit in my old targus bag.

Summary: Would recommend, a good buy.

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