Design and features
For a laptop under AU$1000, the Compaq Presario CQ61 is surprisingly well built and even includes the silken touchpad found on its premium HP cousins.
It is unspectacular to look at compared to today's inlaid designs found on premium laptops, but for AU$1000 you're going to be making some concessions. The back of the 15.6-inch, 1366x768 screen is a simple piano black with the Compaq "Q" logo, while internally is a mix of matte black and silken silver. A hot air vent is featured on the left-hand side, potentially warming any left hander who wants to use an external mouse.
There's only one quick launch button here to turn on and off the wireless — otherwise the only other button is the power button, both situated in the middle underneath the monitor.
There are three USB ports (although one is shared with an eSATA port), 56Kbps modem and 100Mb Ethernet jacks, VGA out, an SD/MS/MMC/xD card reader, a DVD+-RW, and headphone and microphone jacks dotted around the outside edge. The lack of gigabit Ethernet is interesting considering its ubiquity on everything bar netbooks these days, and following this downgrade the Compaq only offers 802.11g instead of 802.11n and no Bluetooth. ExpressCard is missing too — HP has clearly opted to improve build quality and design at the expense of lowering some of the system spec, although if you're buying at this price level then you'll likely not notice or care about the performance drop anyway. Uncommon for this price point is the inclusion of an HDMI port.
Software-wise, HP has included its new user-friendly HP Advisor software, the usual smattering of trial games, Norton Internet Security 2009 trial, Microsoft Office 2007 trial, and has chosen to plague Internet Explorer with the AOL toolbar. eBay is still buying space to put its icon on the desktop; however, HP has also included the useful Cyberlink PowerDVD suite, for media playback and disc burning.
Performance
Internally is an Intel Celeron 900 at 2.2GHz, 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive, all running on Windows Vista Home Premium. This equated to two hours, 13 minutes and 48 seconds of battery time in our overly harsh battery test, which involves playing back an XviD movie with power-saving features turned off, and screen brightness and volume set to maximum. Every day use will see a significantly increased battery time.
Benchmark-wise, it scored 671 in 3DMark06 on account of its Intel integrated graphics — this is not a gaming machine. PCMark05 looked better with 2686 though, making it fine for office use and web browsing.
The Compaq Presario CQ61-217 adds a little bit of extra quality to the sub-AU$1000 market, though sacrifices on its network capability. For AU$799 though, it's a steal, and if you're not concerned by some of the lacking components, this one's a good buy.
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