Living with a laptop... (HP Compaq Business Notebook Nx9010)

Member Name: blanchie14c

Product:	HP Compaq Business Notebook Nx9010
Date:	21/05/05 (1319 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Stylish, Sleek

Disadvantages: Poor Speakers

I never bought my NX9010 by choice - my ThinkPad got damaged and my home insurance replaced it with one of these. I've had it a full year now so it has had a proper field test! The only problems I have had so far have been software related…
Sometimes when I switched it on, the machine just would not load any further than the welcome to windows screen. I eventually learnt that this was a software conflict between Windows XP service pack 2 and Norton anti Virus 2004. After binning the anti virus software all has been well.

So the laptop then….

Stylish and sturdy it has a robust grey and silver plastic case, and so far it hasn't shown any scratches, maybe it is scratch resistant? It has all of the features of a mid-priced laptop - 30 gig HD, CDRW / DVD combi drive, USB 2 (3 ports) Firewire port, TV out port, LAN etc etc

What bugs me about it?

Well by today's standard 30 gigabytes is pretty small for a laptop, but this was a mid-priced unit and that was a year ago…

There are 5 'hot keys' at the top of the keyboard, the idea is to be able to open 'help', 'outlook' 'find' etc with just one key press. Well I can't see the use for them, maybe others find them useful but maybe HP would have been better spending that allocation of the cost on upgraded features.

Memory - the unit comes with 256 mb but really a multi tasking machine running Windows XP is a lot happier running on 512mb, especially when the video card shares this memory. It was easy to upgrade though, just a couple of screws, and slot another 256 in, easy as that! Now I can afford to allocate 64 meg to the video and watch perfect playback of DVD's.

There is a floppy drive that I've never used, do people still use floppies?! Maybe a multi-card reader would have been better instead? I do have a card reader that slots straight into the expansion slot, so the floppy drive is there should I need it.

The real bugbear of this machine is the built in speakers. With the volume up full, I sometimes struggle to hear DVD soundtracks. I've since bought some external speakers that take power from the USB port.

What do I like?

The freedom! The machine is similar spec to my tower computer but that lives in the spare room, upstairs. With this I can sit in front of the TV and work with no loss of computing power. My internet broadband is supplied via a USB modem, so I can just move the modem about from room to room. The brightness of the screen can be altered so on a bright day I can adjust to always see clearly. The touch pad works really well, and I very rarely have to use an external mouse. Window XP pre-installed, but it comes with the disk, that alone is worth £70, a software disk is also supplied containing some basic software - CD creator, Acrobat reader etc

What would I change?

Bigger HD, more memory, bin some useless features and replace with more relevant features for today's market. (floppy for a card reader etc) better speakers and a DVD RW rather than the combi drive.

Not exactly in-depth I know, but at the end of the day it's a computer, and it works - very well! You can get technical specifications anywhere. It was a mid price machine a year ago, and looking around today, for the same money (£750.00) you would be hard pressed to find another similar spec from a respected manufacturer.

Summary: