Is the Compaq Presario C717NR notebook a good laptop?

Question

Circuit City has them on sale for $299 and I think I'm going to buy one for my boyfriend but I was trying to find reviews and couldn't find any.

The laptop has 1gb ram and an 80gb hard drive. And yes, the ever so popular Vista.

(I'm not a fan of windows, but for his purposes mac is not ideal)

Answer 1

Ah, good! 1GB of ram is the minimum needed for Vista. Ask them how much memory the laptop will accept. If you can't do it now, look into getting at least 2GB of memory.

Also, ask Circuit City about the restore disks. an 80Gb hard drive is rather small. You can pick up a bigger and faster hard drive off of Newegg.com. If you have a restore disk, it is easy enough to put in a new hard drive and reinstall Vista. If they have saved the "restore" on to the disk, get Circuit City "Firedogs" to create a restore disk for you. (Always essential to have a restore disk!)

So, to answer your question, it is not a "good" notebook. But it is not a "bad" notebook. It is somewhere inbetween, maybe an "OK" or "passable" notebook. It is cheap and shows a lot of promise for it's cost. I think that it would be good for schoolwork and surfing the internet, but video games (especially high end games) will strain it's resources.

Before you buy it, talk to him and see if he want's a higher end model. (I know, you probably want it to be a surprise.) See if he has some money put away for a laptop. Ya'll would do much better to buy a higher end model. (Trust me, if he knows what he wants and he has his heart set on certain technical details, don't get the wrong thing.)

Good luck!

Answer 2

I had a bad experience with compaq. I don't like them.

Don't buy laptops that are very cheap, there are always something wrong with those- for example, it might have windows vista + 512 MB RAM?

512 MB RAM does not match well with vista! if you do its shows very poor performance!