Compaq Evo Notebook N600c (470023-406)

Pros: Light, great battery life, reasonable screen, stick pointer, well-built, network ready.
Cons: Poor sound, slowish, average keyboard.

I was surprised when I read the other reviews about this Compaq laptop. All the praise seemed a little over the top, and when I read comments about how fast it was, I had to laugh.

Let's be realistic here--this is a 1.2 Gig laptop. It isn't...

Pros: Great performance, solidly built, light weight, LONG battery life, decent mobile gaming platform.
Cons: No firewire, fan is a little noisy.

My previous laptop was a Dell Inspiron 8000. It was a monster of a laptop able to play games, crunch applications, and just about everything else I threw at it. Then my wife got one of theses and the reign of the Inspiron ended. I loved it so much that...

Pros: Very stable, very powerful, looks and feels like "high quality"
Cons: It doesn't weigh less than 5 pounds if you need to carry the CD-DVD everywhere.

I never trusted Compaq, had heard bad things about their computers (reliability, costumer service, etc.) Like one person once said, I never thought I'd see the word "good" in the same sentence as "Compaq".

Background: Need this for work. Use...

Pros: great battery life, fast, and stable
Cons: No firewire, mouse control with docking station is problematic

Originally I wanted to stay away from Compaq. I worked with Compaq as a software vendor and was not overly impressed.

Now I've owned a few Dell laptops (and worked with Dell as a software vendor too), but while the price was great, the...

Pros: 4 hrs. battery. Great weight, great screen, great keyboard, solid
Cons: No Firewire

I saw a great offer for 999 (including the DVD/CD-RW, and FREE S/H) and had to take it. Microwarehouse has constant good deals on this notebook.

I was scared at first as i always feared a notebook would unstable. I've had it for 4 months now....

Pros: Both stick and touchpad mouse, Compaq website great for software/firmware download.
Cons: BIOS needs to be upgraded from original shipping version to make some features work properly.

I bought this second hand from my work when they were auctioning off old PC's so bought it for an excellent price.
I am happy with the performance since my machine has 512MB of ram.

I have installed Linux Mandrake on this machine and it runs very well after upgrading to the latest BIOS available from the HP/Compaq site.

In this respect this machine is brilliant, as would any other HP/Compaq machine be. The Compaq site has all the software and software upgrades you could need for a 2nd hand laptop, which makes things much easier when it may not come with all items it was originally shipped with.

For my needs (media playing mostly) this Laptop has enough grunt for playing music/movies very well.
It is a nice basic machine and for the price I paid for it very good value for money.

Another thing I should mention about the BIOS upgrade is that the mouse and power management would not work in Mandrake without it so I would recommend this enhancement for anyone wanting to run Linux on this machine.