Compaq EVO N600c

[Temetka]

I just scored a Compaq EVO N600c.

Specs:

1.2GHz PIII-M

Radeon Radeon 32MB

Floppy

AC Adapter

512MB (256x2)PC133 SODIMMS

40GB 5400RPM Hard Drive

* No optical drive

This is a pretty sweet machine! It's very fast under XP SP3 (Pro, Legal). Wifi is being handled by my Linksys PCMCIA 802.11g card. I also upgraded the hard drive with a 100GB 7200RPM model and I also upgraded the RAM to 1GB (2x512). With the upgrades in place this thing makes for quite the capable laptop. I am actually posting this message from my living room couch. The keyboard is a tad on the tough side to get used to and the spacebar doesn't always work in which case I have to hit it twice. It's greatly reduced my typing speed. I am going to see if once I type on it more if I can break it in a little bit to become more comfortable.

Oh and the best part:

Free.

 

[Temetka]

UPDATE: The right speaker was not functioning. After opening up the laptop I discovered that in the past some jackass had completely yanked the connector off that plugs into the mobo. Fortunately that same connector is standard on CR2032 and CR2035 laptop CMOS batteries. It's a simple 2-pin plug. So I took apart an old one that was dead, clipped the leads off and stripped the end 1/3". I then stripped the end of the speaker wires, and twisted the 2 pairs together. Then I simply plugged the speaker back in, and voila! Sound. Imagine that.

It never ceases to amaze me how many 'techs' break stuff they are attempting to fix. I think they are attempting to fix it so that it is so fixed that it can only be fixed by replacing the part in question.

Oh and this post was a bit easier to type. I just have to remember to hit the spacebar a little bit harder with my thumb that would ordinarily be required on my Thinkpad. Still it's nice to have a Compaq again. I had an old Armada 4131T and an Armada M300. I always wanted one of the EVO'sbut never had the cash to pick one up. Using the 14" XGA LCD is a nice break from the 15" XGA LCD in my Thinkpad T60. Things look more proper on a 14" @1024x768 than they do on a 15" 1024x768 LCD. It could just be my personal perspective, but I showed the two machines to a friend of mine and he also agreed that the 14" display looked better.

 

[quinterro]

I have worked on a few of those. Nice find!

 

[Temetka]

Thank you. Minus the hard to press keyboard, I quite like this laptop.

 

[Temetka]

I took the laptop over to a friends house to show it off. A client happened to call me requiring some remote support. The only machine I had access to was the Compaq. The machine performed admirably during a rather lengthy logmein session across multiple computers and while I was also VPN'd in to the main server at my company and managing 1 other on-site server for my client.

Oh and I did all of this on battery. The battery that came with the machine is averaging a little over 3 hours of use. I can hit 4 hours if I pull my wifi card out and clock the CPU down to 800MHz. I also enabled the ATI Powerplay feature which reduces GPU power consumption when not in use.

More and more I am liking this machine quite a lot. It's not a replacement for my dual core T60, but it is definitely a machine that I will not hesitate to use and will be happy with its performance as well. To be honest, this machine is quite capable in XP Pro. I've done some basic photoshop work on it as well as some VB programming and a few older games. The 32MB Radeon card delivers excellent performance for video playback, gaming and desktop GUI acceleration.

I could go on and on, but you get the point.