I purchased this laptop toward the end of 2009 as a Christmas present for my daughter - It was bought from Tesco and was on offer at £320 (reduced from £370). The reason for choosing this particular model was due to a few factors, budget, good specification, reliable make and the fact that the laptop actually looks good was a bonus. originally my daughter had asked for a pink laptop, however on searching the internet it seemed that the fact it was pink only added to the cost of the laptop and in some cases the specification wasn't as good.

The laptop was easy to set up using the Compaq's built in start up (which unfortunately I have had to use quite a few times since buying due to it having problems whilst booting and requiring me to do a complete factory restore. Luckily enough the hard drive was partitioned which meant that it kept all the necessary drivers and operating system so even though I have had to do this it was fairly simple and didn't actually take long to do.

One thing I should mention is that not only does the battery not last very long but we have had to buy replacement chargers due to various problems with the original one. We are now on our 4th charger for the laptop however as it failed during the first year Compaq did send us our first replacement free of charge. The battery which comes with the laptop cannot withstand being charged/discharged too many times and it has come to the point now that the battery will not charge at all and my daughter has resorted to just using the laptop with it constantly plugged into the mains having removed the battery completely. I would suggest that if you are planning to use this laptop on the move it would be prudent to invest in a spare battery.

Although the laptop is fairly robust we have found that the keyboard is not - my wife's dog jumped onto the laptop when it was left open on my daughters bed and since then one of the keys has completely come off and cannot be refitted and another is loose. I have seen replacement keyboards for this model on the internet which may suggest that this is a common problem with the laptop.

With regards to the usage of the laptop, primarily it was for facebook/ebay etc however my daugther has installed the Sims 2 on it and it does not have a problem playing games. However if you do start installing too much software on it which constantly runs behind the scenes then the processor does struggle to cope with doing even some of the most basic tasks. If you refrain from installing a lot of junk onto it then it runs at a decent speed and can play high quality videos fullscreen. The model which I purchased had 3GB of memory which means ample for running Windows 7.