Customer Reviews

Compaq Presario 2195US Laptop (1.87-GHz Athlon XP 2500+, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB, DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The price of this laptop is pretty close to a comparable desktop with a CRT. It is cheaper than buying a desktop computer with an LCD display. Comparing computers at list price, this is a good value. HP (Compaq's parent company) will have a similar setup for around the same price, and so will eMachines (but they only have one model). The HP and Compaq's will generally be a better deal than Toshiba, IBM or any of the mail orders (Dell, Gateway, etc.) But, computers have so many rebates now a days, that you have to do a lot of leg work to determine what is the best deal.

This model is $150 more than Compaq's entry level model 2190. It is probably worth the extra $150 (just for the increased memory). But, sometimes you can find some crazy number of rebates on the 2190, that the price difference between the 2190 and 2195 is very significant.

This laptop has all the basics for almost any kind of job. The only downside is that the USB ports are 1.1 instead of the faster 2.0. I don't know how much new stuff is coming with 2.0. It can be a big deal if you try to run anything off your USB ports that requires speed, such as a external DVD burner, or video camera. But, this laptop has the firewire port for direct connection to video.

This laptop is heavy and bulky. It is over 7 pounds (but so are most other entry level laptops). It is thicker than most. It wouldn't be a great laptop for someone who travels on planes. But, it is adequate for someone who has a small desk (like in a kid's bedroom) or wants to roam around the house or watch movies during a long car trip.

Battery life will be long enough to watch a full DVD. Newer, more expensive laptops will have longer battery life.

This laptop has an integrated 802.11g compatible wireless network card. The defaults for the wireless network are set up so that you loose connection once the signal gets weak. After some painful interaction with Compaq's technical support, I was able to change the wireless settings so the system now works much better with a weak signal. However, I still cannot get the laptop to make the initial connection is weak. When I start up the laptop, I have to walk closer to the transmitter to make the connection and then I can walk away.

I had a nasty experience with Compaq technical support. I called on a Sunday (that might be a mistake). After going through the menus, I was put on hold for at least 15 minutes. Once I got a technicial, he said that he doesn't handle this type of laptop and he transferred me to someone who does. After waiting on hold for another 30 mintues, the next technician told me that he also doesn't handle these laptops. He tried to transfer me, but I go cut off. I called 2 more times, again getting the wrong technicians and getting cut off. I finally got the correct technician. He said there was nothing he could do about about my problem. After 10 minutes, he got his supervisor, who also said there was nothing they could do. So, I sent in an email to the Compaq support line. They promise a response within an hour. It took about 3 hours (but that was OK) and I got a list of suggestions of what to do. That fixed by problems. At the end of the email, Compaq wrote, if you have any more questions, please reply back to this email. I did have a few more questions. Compaq's response was to call their technical line. I replied that there was no way I was going to call the technical line again and that I wanted my email forwarded on to someone who understood the systems. It has been 3 days and I haven't heard back yet.

First of all technical service is really bad. I bought my notebook two months back. Sometimes (not always) my new laptop was not booting at all. I called up Compaq. The call went to India. I was told that I need to poke into the reset button located at the bottom of notebook and discharge static electricity. He said exactly "you need to do that once in two week, sir". Give me a break! That reset button is not regular use - once in a week. Anybody knows that. Then another day I called up, and the call went China. She asked me to give the list of softwares I installed. I gave her the list - Yahoo Dialup, Photoshop. She suspected that one of these softwares is causing problem. "Who knows, your Photoshop may be causing problem". Give me another break!!!! A software is causing system not to reboot (that is not even a system software or device driver, it's a imgae processing software)!!!! She asked me to format the disk and install Window XP again. I did that and as expected, the problem did not go away. Eventually after one months of ordeal, calling technical support more than 10 times (not to mention how long I had to wait for each call), they asked me to send it to Compaq repair service center. They found problem in hard-disk and replaced it.
Bottom line, Compaq technical support is bad. Thousands of people in India and China are recruited by Compaq/HP and given a month crash course, and suddenly within one month they become technical experts to solve the problems. But the real fact is that, their intention is not to support, but somehow convince the customers to live with the problem. Otherwise why on the earth someone asks me to use the reset button every week. Is that a responsible answer from the company who sold me the notebook? In that one month, I understood couple of things

- all the technical support guys are given a huge book problem list and their answers. They know nothing practical about the notebooks (probably they never saw the notebooks they are providing technical support for ). So whenever customer calls up, they go through the list and try to find the "matching" problem. Whatever the answer they get for that "matching" problem - that's the answer. Now they will ask you to follow few steps and "solve" (???) the problem. They really don't care if that is REALLY solving the problem or customer is satisfied. "Answer" is answer - problem solved. If you ask them again, then you will get some vague answers - "you have to use reset button one in a week".

- They try to avoid any repair at Repair Center. I believe all the technical support guys are instructed to avoid making service order as much as possible. They will try to avoid making a service order any possible way (I wild guess is that any service order effects their performance review). I think it's fair game to minimizing service order for repair. People should not send their computer to repair center for trivial reason that can be solved by technical support - especially all the software issues. But when it is not getting solved after calling three times (certainly not 10 times), and it's clear that the problem certainly not a software issue, then they should be forthcoming to make a repair order. But it was not the case. They simply try to avoid that, until you are fed up and frustrated.

- All the technical support guys are instructed to be VERY polite, but I don't think they are instructed to deliver good and effective support. You will hear "sorry for the inconvenience", but at the end you will get a vague answer. Ironic...cheap labor.

I paid [$$$] for warranty and I do not think that this kind of service worths that much.

I purchased a sony frv31 laptop with a celeron 2.4ghz processor recently and only was dissapointed. Battery life was absolutely terrible, lasting merely and hour at most. Enter the Compaq 2195us. The most important achievement of this laptop is the fact that I have gotten over 3 hours of use out of it with one charge. The only processor that I would think to do better would be the Centrino, but this laptop was much more attractively priced at 949.99 at Circuit City. Not only is the battery life better, but it also includes 512mb of ddr memory, a 40gb harddrive, a dvd/cd-rw combo drive, and integrated 54g wireless. I can't ask for much more for under $1000.

P.S. Don't go to best buy. That's where I bought the first one and the support there is absolutely horrible! Circuit City doesn't charge restocking fees and are much nicer and more helpful to customers. Best Buy is the only place I have ever been to that the customer is not always right.

Good work horse laptop... I initially had problems with this notebook and ran into a lot of red tape calling tec support in India. After 2-3 weeks of inconsistencies I finally called the Headquarters in the US and my problem was resolved ASAP. No problems since with the exception of a dead battery.

There's a lot to like about this notebook. I really liked this model and after using it for weeks I bought a second, and shortly a third.

It's a wonderfully capable laptop with a boatload of features at the price. Easy to travel with, and offers better than average battery life.

At one full year, the standard warranty is four times as long as what you get from Dell.

Owning and using this portable will make you very comfortable at the idea of buying another Presario or other HP-Compaq notebook computer in the future.

I bought this notebook in Jan 2003 for $750 from Circuitcity. Ever since the performance has been top-notch. I use Redhat linux and I have been able to configure all the h/w including the wireless card. The internal wireless card works quite well. I have a wireless network at home and I use a Netgear MR-814 router which works seamlessly.

Bottomline: very good buy in that price range

I've only had this notebook for a few weeks but I love it. It's faster than my Athlon 2400 desktop and even performs better than my Pentium 4 that I had to scrap for parts last year. I haven't had a chance to hook it up to a wireless router so I can't review that quite yet, but I've heard horror stories so i just hope it goes smoothly. I love how this notebook doubles as a portible DVD player. I watched an entire movie on an airplane with no gliches. The only problem is you can't turn the volume up enough when the headphones are attached. I also wish the battery life were a bit longer. Three hours is a tad short in my opinion. The person above me said the Sony burnt out before an hour. You should have checked out your power maintainence settings. That seems awfully short for a Sony.
To wrap up, overall I feel this notebook is worth every penney. I was going to exchange it for a Sony Vaio when I received it (due to my history with crummy Athlon processors) but am glad I held onto the 2195us.

I purchased this laptop about 4 months ago. I have been using it almost every day, mostly around my house, using it with my wireless 54G router. I like listening to radio and tv streams over the net. It performs flawlessly. The high quality of the product, the neat design is surprising for the $899 I paid for it. I get about 2 to 3 hours of battery life with heavy use. Friends that have purchased Dell's are jealous of what I got for the price. I have used it for digital photography and it works great. Nice firewire port. Integrated wireless is great.

I have had this laptop (an older model really with the 2600+ processor but no wireless card, only 20 GB & 256 MB, 64 MB of which is shared to support the video) for just over a year and the warranty just expired. I use the machine mainly as a desktop replacement but I have taken it overseas on a few occasions. The benchmarks put the floating point & integer operations to be faster than a P4 2.8 machine!

I started having problems (fortunately) just before the warranty expired & HP has stepped up to the plate. What differentiates good businesses from bad ones is in how readily they try to fix problems on their part.

In my case, after spending an hour or so with me on the phone, HP tech support adviced me to send them the machine. They could have tried to put it off as one of the other reviewers has complained, and my warranty was to expire in a week or so any way. But they didn't. They couldn't reproduce the problem. I have had to call them twice since then and all I had to do was mention that this was a continuing problem even though my warranty has expired. HP has been very cool with that and have tried helping me spending a few hours with me on the phone trying to diagnose the problem. One of the calls was to their India support center and I was surprised as to how professional they all were. So far the problem appears to be fixed. But it is an intermittant problem and I should give it a few more weeks before being absolutely sure. Because of my pleasant experience with them so far, I have gone ahead and bought an extended warranty from them.

Why only 4 stars? The machine does get quite warm. May be it's the AMD chip. Also USB 2 would have been nice. I didn't get the s-video cable even though there's a TV output. The USB connectors are way too close to the power input. I have another laptop where the power plug is to a side which I find more convenient.

I also bought an aftermarket wireless card which works quite well.

I bought this as a present for myself this 2003 Christmas Eve at Best Buy. There are always better processors and computers, but I am fairly happy with this computer. I build my own destop computers. As others have said the really only downside is the USB 1.1 ports. It would have been nice to have USB 2.0 ports. The weight at 7.3 pounds is not bad and the monitor has been great. I have been fortunate in that I have not had a single problem with my laptop. I use it at work and around the house on a fairly daily basis. The USB port is too close to the power adapter and makes the connection to a USB thumbdrive ackward at times. The wired network connection works great the majority of the time. The built-in wireless card is handy and can be touchy depending on the wireless network that you are trying to connect to. Netgear and 2-Wire wireless routers are fine, but I have had problems with Linksys. Overall, the wireless card is not bad. The battery life is great at 3 hours or more. I was really surprised and only expected 2 hours and sometimes have achieved 4 hours just doing word processing or spreadsheets. The 56K modem is not the greatest, but OK with a connection speed of about 44K most times. Yes, the 2 RAM chip slots are occupied with two 256MB chips. I knew this when I bought the laptop. Plays DVD movies fine. In short, I am happy that I bought this laptop for about $900. There will always be faster and better equipped laptops at a lower price, which I have already seen. Great computer for a great price.
Update on November 16, 2007. I recently upgraded the memory to 1 GB and it runs even faster. So far, I have not had a single problem with this laptop. I am very happy with this laptop.