HI all. This is my first review on MS. I have always wanted to help my friends out there in cyberspace about compters and other gizmos so that they can make a first hand check before plunging in the dough that these things cost and buying them. I own a Compaq Armada 7400 laptop which sports a Pentium 2 Processor clocking at 366 Mhz.
I bought it about a year ago from a friend who was using it in the US. To be very short and concise, this baby really kicks some butt. I used it to record a professional CD Album, I used it for my business trips to deliver seminars, I used it for playing games like Quake 2 etc, used it as a DJ sound mixing module in some parties and finally use it for watching movies on the go. Note this is a PENTIUM 2. Nowadays with laptops costing not less than a lakh in most cases. Im talking about the likes of the Pentium 4’s. I tried doing the same things I did with my laptop on other newer P4 laptops. Franky I did not find any dramatic difference at all. At the end of the day my faithful armada managed to stay stable and was still breathing when all those pricey P4s started gurgling due to their not so strong chassis’ and less durable design. I upgraded my hard disk to 20 GB and ram to 128 MB. It has a built in modem which performs really good.
The speakers on the laptop are absolutely top-notch. Even with this older model, compaq made sure they had some pretty decent speakers mounted on this rig. The soundcard has an option for outputting 3D sound which boasts itslf while yu watch movies. The LCD is crisp with no after shadows or ’lines’ as some people complain. Wallpapers look really bright and clear on the desktop. A 4MB agp by S3 lurks under the hood and gives some really good looking gaming eye-candy. Of course yu cannot play very graphically intense games but games like Flight simulator and the like look marvellous and it runs at a resolution of 1024X768 too.Phew..thats a lot of praises..now for the downsides. This laptop is ’heavy’. Its evident the moment yu take it out of ur bag to place on a table. Also the absence os a Lan port is another minus. Another inconvenience is that the floppy drive isnt built in and has to be swapped with the CD ROM drive.
A worthy mention shoud be given for the Infra REd port which is very good if yu have a PDA or a phone with an infra red port. Yu can sync outllok emails and contacts over the air without using cables which is fantastic. Lastly and most importantly...the battery.Hmmmm...now theres where I would have loved to see some improvement. Just an hour with all eye candy shut off is not really top notch. BUT HEY...at the end of the day what I have is a laptop which is built like a tank, runs real fast and is an eye pleaser. I really do not need anything else. GO FOR IT if yu get a good price is my advice to yu friends.