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General discussion

Compaq...quality, experience and price.

Mar 21, 2005 11:29AM PST

Hi, I am on a budget here looking for a new laptop. I found the Compaq R3399CL for $999 at eCost.com. It looks great, here are the specs. Athlon 64 at 3400+ with PowerNow...thats like 3.2 ghz I think. 1gig of ram.. 80gig hard drive at 5400 rpm. 64mb nVIDIA GeForce Go 4 440 dedicated. DVD re-write, no - though. Wireless, big screen, 5-1 media reader. All for $999. Now this is my second laptop, and I'm not sure what to get. I've heard that quality on Compaq laptops is not great...I've also heard that HP fixed that problem. I think that $999 is a great price. But I want to get some good ideas from people. ALso, would I be able to just play a few games on it like hitman, maybe a little of CS, my friend has 64mb shared video ram and hes played CS and Half-Life 2. I will also run programs like photoshop or video editing. Just some help on quality, and whatever else.Just some opinions please. Thanks a lot for your help.

http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?dpno=758867

Discussion is locked

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Bad Compaq Experience
Mar 25, 2005 7:35AM PST

I had a Compaq laptop(still have it)....went through a whole lot with it. I had several problems...tried to communicate via phone with tech support....they walked me through processes that caused a ton more problems. I had to then send it in for them to fix the whole thing.....They then blamed ME for the problems it had! They were yelling at ME on the phone....even though I never did a thing to it. Basically, the computer(laptop) was awful to start...and they had really awful tech support/customer support. I have not dealt with them since the merger(HP/Compaq), so I hope that they've gotten better.
I have not had problems dealing with HP tech support for my current HP desktop....hope this helps.

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Compaq Quality
Mar 25, 2005 10:29AM PST

After having gone through Toshibas, Fujitsu, Dells and IBMs, I decided to go back to Compaq and picked up a R3470US with the Athlon 64 at 3400+ processor. It has 1gig ram and 100gb HD.
Simply just a super machine. Very quite and with a VG screen, and fast!
Replaced XP Home with professional and reloaded the HP enhancements. Highly recommend this machine.

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Just got 2 of those at the office.
Mar 25, 2005 11:22AM PST

They had the wireless option and more for a little less. It plays the games well, even with just 64MB dedicated video ram. Just drop the settings a little if the frame rate suffers. Look at compgeeks.com refurbs for the ones we got. We paid 720 for 1 and 829 for the other. I had to hand out drool guards.

Bob

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Go for it
Mar 26, 2005 11:45AM PST

Same like others, I have quite a few notebooks with different brands including the supposedly superior Alienware (crappy service though). I would say, go for the Compaq u found. That's a good deal and I have a couple of Compaq notebooks those last forever without ever sending them for service. I drop them a few times also and they are still fine.