Customer Reviews

Compaq Presario R3240US Laptop (2.00 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD+RW/CD-RW Drive)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I recently ordered this item direct from Compaq (shipped from China but only took 2 days), build time was about a week. Since I ordered a custom built, I got the 2.2ghz (3400+) Athlon 64 chip, 1GB ram, 60gb, 15.4" (upgraded resolution to 1680 x 1050), upgraded 8 cell battery to 12 cell battery, upgraded to 4X DVD+R burner.

Pros:
- LIGHTENING FAST FOR A LAPTOP - fastest I've ever used or seen.
- Great photo editing - images resize immediately and you can load many photos at once (I upgraded to 1GB RAM which really helps).
- Very attractive notebook, silver inside and dark black/blue outside.
- Screen is wonderful, bright, and viewing angle is excellent.
-Burner is fast and hasn't let me down.
-Keyboard is full size and very comfortable.
-Power cable is on the back - why should I have to see it anyway?
-3 USB 2.0 allow for very high speed transfers. 2 USB on left, 1 on right.
- Boots up fast, easy to get out of hibernation.
-GREAT BATTERY LIFE. Best I've seen, especially compared to a Dell I barely got 1 hour out of! For such a speedy notebook, when you hibernate it, it really conserves. All night in hibernation, away from A/C, I think it went down only 8% or less!
-SOLID notebook, doesn't feel cheap or flimsy.
-Speaker controls are nicely placed on the right hand side of the notebook. CD-RW/DVD-R is on the left side.
-Trackpad's scroll area is convenient and easy to use. It's also nice you can turn off the trackpad so when you're typing you don't accidentally hit it.




CONS:
-Why doesn't the built in media slot have a compact flash slot - the most common type of media? It would have been very handy.
- I use an external mouse, but when I use the trackpad's buttons, they're noisy.
-It's a bigger notebook, you'll notice it's size/weight, but how do you expect to get a powerhouse without having a bigger notebook?
-No other complaints.

Overall, I'd rate it a 9.5/10. First the speed is going to amaze you, then compare to other manufacturers, and you'll be amazed the deal you got.

PS - one note - I got XP home preinstalled, I thought when I got the notebook I'd upgrade to XP Pro (I already have a copy). It won't let you, the drivers for XP Pro are not on the notebook. I called tech. support and they said your hard drive is corrupt now and you have to reinstall. Luckily, I didn't install anything important yet. There's no huge different between Home and XP (besides networking) and I really don't feel like giving Microsoft another $50 of my hard earned $. I just would have liked to know I couldn't install Pro later.

Don't compare this to an Athlon "XP" notebook, it's not the same. Athlon 64 is much faster than Athlon XP. This is the Athlon "64" chip, allowing for constant 64-bit processing. It blows P4 chips out of the water with "hyper threading", which isn't active ALL the time. The Athlon 64 bit chip is! This is the future of notebooks! Athlons have always been speedier than P4's for much less money! You won't be let down.

This powerhouse of a notebook is so fast I still can't get over it.

PS. #2 - don't buy the service plan in stores like Best buy or even Circuit city. If you do buy a notebook from those retail stores, call Compaq/HP up and ask for THEIR service plan. For $299 (less than Best Buy) you can get "3-year HP Accidental Damage Protection with Express Repair extended service plan
Protect your investment from all forms of accidental damage for 3 years!". That includes droppings, spills, falls, surges, collisions, etc. If I was going to waste money on a service plan, it definitely be Compaqs Accidental and EXPRESS REPAIR than stupid Best buy's rip off for $350 that doesn't cover the battery or anything accidentally. And I've heard horrible things about their repairs - takes forever, months, they're general idiots!

Buy from Compaq directly, you'll be happier!

This was the best notebook I ever owned. Just gave to my daughter for Fall 2008 semester at college. I would still take it over a new laptop with Vista for an OS. We did learn that dropping it off a table with the screen open can break the glass inside the screen and mess it up for using the laptop screen.

I just found a factory replacement screen for $69.99 on the internet and 40 minutes later good as new again. Yes there is better equipment out there and my alternative was a black MacBook to avoid buying Vista. The R3240US is now pretty cheap in the used markets, and given the ease they can be taken apart and repaired I may buy a couple of the used ones and have a good back-up with Win XP as well as a supply of parts. It really has lasted well other than the 3 foot drop test my kiddo subjected it to. No other problems with hardware and as for Windows, what can I say there!

As the first reviewer said - it is a blazingly fast and fairly attractive laptop. It outperforms a 3.2Ghz P4 laptop with same RAM. If you run a 64bit OS like a decent Linux Distro - Gentoo or XP X64 edition (drivers for all devices in this laptop are available for X64 edition) - you get absolutely terrific performance for a laptop.

It also operates very cool - Fan comes on only when you do continuous compiles, or other similar CPU intensive work.
The 15.4' wide screen also makes it a pleasure to use.

I recommend you get XP Professional instead of Home - reason being you can upgrade to XP-Pro 64bit for free.

I didn't give it 5 star rating because of the outdated Nvidia GeForce Go440 graphics card on it. Not that it is a problem - it works good - I get decent performance while playing games, but still it's an outdated card.

Compaq doesn't seem to be selling this exact model anymore but you can go for any Mobile Athlon64 laptop they sell.

When you first get a Compaq R3000 series computer, you love it. The price-performance looks great. The AMD processor performs well. 512 MB of DDR RAM is great. The 60 GB hard drive is large enough for most users. My favorite feature is the push button to disable the glide pad.

After 1 year, you realize the quality is poor. Plastic parts begin to break and fall off. My eject buttons for the PCMCIA slots fell off, and I have never used them. The computer overheats and locks up often. The DVD drive door often opens by itself. The CD writer has never worked. After going through the technical support website, I discovered that the inability to write CDs was a known bug. After one year, there is still no fix.

I bought this machine for the sheer power and so many other features it has. well the processor is really fast on the 32 bit XP but it goes on fire on a 64 bit platform. im an AMD64 fan now. i have dual OS on this machine now one being linux and XP. both run awesome. The benchmark test i did with an inependent software leaves the intel processors way behind. way to go.

If you are in the market for a notebook or a desktop, check this one out.

This is truly a system you could use to replace your existing desktop. It is fast, it is efficent, it is handy.

There is a printer port and a monitor port on the back, there is a keyboard port on the right as well as an S-video on the right. That is of course in addition to the 3 2.0 usb ports and the 5 in 1 reader. It has an integrated dvd+r/rw and cd-rw. And it is ready for wireless connections.

It is also upgradeable. Although it comes with the 512, there is room to expand to 1.2. Add to the the fact that the operating systems don't yet fully take advantage of the speed of the 64 bit processor and you have a system that might at least keep up with the curve for a while.

I absolutely love it. I haven't been disappointed by anything as of yet.