Good little PC
Written: Feb 12 '01 (Updated Feb 13 '01)
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Pros: Light, good keyboard
Cons: Power Saving has never worked right
The Bottom Line: Very happy with the machine, but some small design flaws.
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| KenRona's Full Review: Compaq Armada M300 (124788-052) PC Notebook |
I have had the Armada for about 6 months now and feel like I can give it a fair shake. It is a company machine, so I did not have to pay for any of the peripherals. I have the floppy drive and have used a USB CD without any problems.
Short take
The machine has been very reliable and is a pleasure to carry around. Especially without the battery. On the down side, it worked terribly with win 95, but is pretty stable with Win 2k. Despite some minor design flaws, I am very happy with it. Good machine for traveling teams.
Long Take
First some thoughts on the features, then a general sum up.
My machine has a 500 Mhz processor and 256k of memory. In addition, I have a 10 gig hard disk. It is plenty fast.
The M300 has a roughly 11 inch screen that is more than adequate. It could be a little brighter and it is hard to see in direct sunlight, but I really have no complaints in terms of viewability. It has good, off axis viewing and rebounded nicely from the one time I dropped it. One problem I have is that the when closed, the keys touch the screen and leave marks. You can’t see the marks when the machine is operating, but the design could have been better.
Network and modem are built in and have worked well with no problems. Once broken it, battery life is about 2.5 hours. I like the design of the battery. It is hinged to the computer and makes the whole unit resemble a hard bound book. The battery also props up the back of the keyboard for those who like to type at an angle. Second caveat is that you can place the computer flat if you are using any of the ports on the back. The connectors get in the way. Not a major hardship for me, but a little irritating. Another one of those little design things. The floppy plugs into the parallel port and works just fine. I don’t like the connector on the floppy. It tends to separate from the drive when I travel. There are connectors for an external monitor, and USB but the coolest thing on the back plane is the IR port.
The IR port deserves a separate paragraph. First a little background. I work in a business that uses a lot of teams. We normally go to a client site and work in conference rooms. One of the pervasive problems we have is swapping data when away from our office network. Obviously, there are options, but the IR port makes other options unnecessary. When two machines get in line of sight of each other, the IR ports make a connection. If one person wants to send a file, the just click on the little IR icon in the system tray and up pops a dialog box. The dialog box allows the sender to select files to transmit over the IR connection. Once he is finished, a dialog box pops up on the other machine asking if the receiver wants the files. It is pretty fast and very useful. Some warnings. We could never get this to work in win 95. It was fairly simple to set up in Win 2k. Great feature. Oh yea, you can use the IR port to synch your Palm and PC. Even less wires to carry.
The unit has a touch pad that works well and is positioned comfortably. My thumb sometimes brushed against the pad sending the mouse zooming, but no major hassles.
I have never had great success with power management with the M300. It was terrible with Win 95 but a bit better using Win 2k. One puzzle that I currently have is when I push the hibernate button (at the top of the keyboard), the hard drive does not power down for a while. Like a half an hour or so. I have not figured this one out, but it is really a minor problem. One of the nice things is that the machine can go a very long time in hibernate mode. I shut it down for a week and it came right back up. No hassles.
All in all, I am pretty happy with the M300 and would recommend it for business use. It is probably a little small for home use, but great for the business traveler.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): n/a
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 401-500
Screen Size: 11
RAM: 256
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
KenRona
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Member: Kenneth Rona
Reviews written: 11
Trusted by: 25 members
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