Compaq V2570N Notebook Reviews

Transcript of Video Review

This is a Compaq V 2000 N series laptop. This particular model is a V2570. I bought this laptop about 5 or 6 months ago, in January of 2006 for $750. Aside from the typical features of a laptop that anyone would expect, this one has a 6-in-1; think a 6-in-1 card reader. Doesn't allow you to read Compaq flash though. It's kind of disappointing but not to me because I don't have any Compaq flash memory cards. It also has 3 USP ports, there's one here, there's one here and there's one here, so that if you have USP devices that have a large bulky end to them you don't have to worry about plugging them in next to each other and then not being able to fit. This model also has a DVD writer; I actually find that the DVD writer is kind of slow both in writing DVDs and CDs and also in reading DVDs and CDs. I guess I'm just used to desktops so much that I don't know, it just, it seems slow to me but maybe it's also just a bad writer. It still works though, so, whatever. It's got video out, if you wanted to send S-Video to TV monitor or something like that. On the other side it's got an expansion port. I'm sure some people out there use this. I never have. It's got built in Ethernet of course, but also built in 26K modem and built in wireless Internet card -- I guess access. It's only got 1 PCMC A slot which is not that great but at least it has one, typically the things that you put into a PCMC A slot would be like a network card or wireless card. So you don't really need more than 1 since it has all this built in. The screen has a native resolution of 1280 by 768. Its wide screen allows you to watch DVDs in wide-screen mode without too much of the black bars at the top and the bottom of the screen like -- videos. This particular model came with 512 MB of RAM and 60GB hard drive. It also has ATI Radeon Xpress 200M video card which isn't one of the best in the market, but it's definitely good for playing either older games or playing newer games on lower resolutions, or lower settings so that it doesn't put too much stress on it. It's definitely not a gaming laptop but it can get you by on maybe like 3 games of Counter Strike, Quake 3, something like that. The, another downfall of this laptop, I would say is the volume controls, that are buttons that are tied in to windows. So all they do is, is use Windows to control the volume. You can't actually control it when you're outside of Windows; you have to be logged in, in order to change the volume on it. I can see the buttons right here. Maybe yeah, and you can turn volume down or volume up and you can mute it. It's muted right now, there's a wireless point in that, thought it was really neat but then I found a lot of laptops have it. And it allows you to turn the wireless off when you're in a, an environment where you only want to use a wire connection for example, you don't want to interfere. Overall I'd say this laptop is really great for the price and still a really good laptop, regardless. It's very portable. I take it to work with me every day in my backpack and it doesn't feel like I'm lugging around a sack of bricks or anything. It's relatively powerful but it's also got a decent battery life, although maybe it's not. I say decent because I'm used to having really old laptops with no battery life, but I just thought about it and typically I get about 2 to 3 hours maybe on the default or the stock battery that came with it. So if that's good for you then great but if not, then you might want to get one of the extended batteries. So yeah, in the end I'd like to recommend this laptop to anyone looking for one. It's got a few features that I don't like but who doesn't, you know, like a few things about everything. So yeah it's a good -- good product.