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The Compaq Presario CQ62 features a subtle texture within the lid that makes it satisfying to look at and maintain.

Port assortment to the CQ62 is extremely basic. VGA, LAN, and two USB ports, along with headphone and mic jacks, are on the left.

The keyboard is roomy and, although not pitch excellent, relatively at ease.

On the proper, you will find a modem and one particular from the three USB ports. You don’t get a memory card reader or an HDMI connector.
HP Compaq Presario CQ62 10 Remarkably very low cost; huge display; passable overall performance for that funds; moderately attractive design No memory-card slot, Webcam, or HDMI port; stiff mouse buttons; narrow LCD viewing angle; limited availability In case you will need a really low-cost laptop computer, the CQ62 is just not a bad bet. It is missing some capabilities, nonetheless it delivers respectable all round performance taking into consideration it fees below $400.
Price (at time of critique): $398 (mfr. est., as examined)
Key Specs Processor: two.1GHz AMD Athlon II Dual-Core P320
Memory: 3GB RAM
Storage: 250GB challenging drive
Optical Generate: DVD±RW
Display: fifteen.six inches (1,366x768 native resolution)
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon High definition 4250 (1GB)
Bodyweight: 5.five pounds
Dimensions (HWD): one.4x9.7x14.seven inches
Working Program: Windows 7 Home Top quality (64-bit)
HP Compaq Presario CQ62 Assessment Reviewed by: Jamie Bsales
Assessment Date: June 2010
If you have been considering a $400 netbook exclusively because it’s an cheap method to nab a useful laptop, Hewlett-Packard, in combination with Wal-Mart, incorporates a powerful choice: a "real" laptop. The Compaq Presario CQ62 is a full-size 15.6-inch laptop with an AMD dual-core processor, available at a beyond-bargain price tag of just $398 (starting this Sunday, June 13, 2010). That’s lower than you’d pay for a refurbished notebook with lesser specs from those deal-a-day sites (or about what you’d pay for a netbook with a fraction from the performance). The catch: It is missing some capabilities now common even on budget laptops, and it’s available only at Wal-Mart although supplies last.


Usually, budget machines are bland and brick-like. But with its textured imprint finish, the matte-black Presario CQ62 incorporates a somewhat stylish look. And at five.five pounds and measuring just one.4 inches thick,Buy Office 2010 Key, it is notably compact given the low price tag and huge screen. The left and correct sides in the gently rounded chassis house an optical generate, 3 USB ports, a VGA connector, LAN and modem ports, and headphone and mic jacks. That’s it: no flash-memory-card slot, no HDMI connector, no ExpressCard slot, no eSATA port. Also deleted to hit the under-$400 cost mark are a Webcam and a fingerprint reader. Some of those items you may be able to live without, especially if the Presario CQ62 would be a secondary machine for you or your household. But we would have preferred to see a card reader and a Webcam make the final cut. Around the plus side, the optical generate is a full-featured 8x DVD burner with LightScribe disc-labeling abilities, and the Presario CQ62 also includes a 250GB 7,200rpm difficult drive and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi wireless networking.


The Presario CQ62’s 15.6-inch display screen is bright, and colors in images and video really pop. (The LCD's glossy finish helps.) The resolution is one,366x768, which makes for extremely readable text on Web sites and the like, although more pixels would let you make better use in the expansive real estate for multitasking. The panel’s viewing-angle sweet spot is also somewhat constrained: Move too far off-center, and you’ll notice a brightness shift. To the other hand, the built-in Altec Lansing speakers deliver plenty of volume and good enough sound quality for Web audio and even movies. But as with all budget machines, sound quality for music playback is a bit strident and lacking bass.
We were pleasantly surprised by the keyboard to the Presario CQ62. Many low-cost machines’ keyboards exhibit flex, but the unit on this machine has a solid feel. The flat-top keys have a good amount of up-down travel,Office Professional Plus 2010 Product Key, and the widely spaced keys are comfy to type on. We’re happy to see that HP has inverted the purpose from the Function ("F") keys, essentially giving you 12 hotkeys for actions such as volume, mute, display screen brightness, next-track/last-track, and so on. In the event you need to access a function, you press a Function crucial combo.


Less ideal is the Presario CQ62’s touch pad. We like the clean glimpse of the hidden-pad layout, where the touch pad just isn't isolated from the surrounding palm rest, but the textured pattern (carried over from the lid) imparts too much friction on your fingers, making mousing less smooth. And the single-bar mouse button (you depress it on one particular end or the other for left and correct clicks) is too narrow and stiff.
As expected, the Presario CQ62 doesn’t have cutting-edge efficiency components. But the 2.1GHz AMD Athlon II Dual-Core P320 processor and 3GB of fast DDR3 memory deliver pretty good productivity functionality for a $400 laptop. The machine scored 3,152 on our PCMark Vantage benchmark test, which measures general method efficiency. That’s lower than the $650 Gateway NV5933u we examined recently (it scored 4,493), but it's not alarmingly far off the 3,800 score that is average for your mainstream class. It also manages to beat out similar budget mainstream notebooks from a year ago, which scored as reduced as 1,829. Plus, this laptop computer uses the 64-bit version of Windows seven House Premium, and it held its own to the 64-bit version of PCMark Vantage,Office 2010 Standard 32 Bit, too, with a score of 3,459, just a hair below the $849 Asus UL50Vf’s score of 3,Office 2007 Ultimate Product Key,563. That's nice for your cost.


The cracks in performance start to show a little more, however, when it comes to multimedia-intensive work. The machine needed 8 minutes and 16 seconds to encode a video on our Windows Media Encoder test, which is more than 3 minutes longer than the Gateway NV5933u took and about 30 seconds longer than the average laptop in this class. On our iTunes encoding trial, in which we convert 11 standard MP3 files to AAC format, the Presario CQ62 completed the task in 6 minutes and 4 seconds, even though the Gateway finished in 4:31. (The average showing for this size of system is 4:42.) Finally, on our 32-bit version of the Cinebench 10 benchmark test, which taxes all the available cores of a processor, the Presario CQ62 scored 3,927. Here, the gap starts to widen between the Gateway budget entry (5,448) and the class average (4,761). But keep in mind the Gateway laptop costs nearly twice as much, and the class-average price is over $1,100.
We didn’t expect much in the way of gaming abilities (beyond low-impact Web games) from this machine, and unsurprisingly, we were correct. The ATI Mobility Radeon Hd 4250 graphics chip in the Presario CQ62 delivered 1,901 on 3DMark06 at 1,024x768 resolution and an unplayable 18 frames per second at that resolution in a single of our standard test games, Company of Heroes. In this laptop's defense, extremely few budget machines deliver impressive efficiency on these tests. With scores like these, you can expect this machine to render images fine and play video, but video editing, 3D gaming, and other graphics-intensive tasks should be reserved for better-equipped laptops.
As for battery life, the Presario CQ62’s six-cell battery lasted two hours and 23 minutes on our harsh DVD rundown test (in which we loop a movie from disc until the battery conks out). That's just 3 minutes shy from the average battery runtime for this class of laptop computer. By comparison, the Gateway NV5933u lasted only 1:36.
The Presario CQ62 delivers a serviceable assortment of software for the price. In addition to the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Property Premium, which includes the handy Media Center multimedia environment, you also get CyberLink PowerDVD 9 for movie playback and CyberLink DVD Suite for CD and DVD creation. HP also preloads 60-day trials for Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Office 2007. The company backs the Presario CQ62 with a one-year warranty and 24-hour, seven-day toll-free tech support, which is typical for HP and nearly all manufacturers.
To be sure, the Compaq Presario CQ62 is just not best, but this machine is all about the value. If an Atom-processor-powered netbook just isn’t your speed and your computing needs are mostly basic, this is a good choice at the value. It offers solid-enough functionality for everyday tasks, a nice big screen, and even a relatively stylish layout. We wish HP worked in a memory-card reader and a Webcam, as photo sharing on Facebook and Skyping with family members is a likely scenario for those in the market for such a budget machine. But if those functions are lost on you (or on whomever you might be thinking about buying this laptop for as a gift, like Grandpa), you’ll be happy you didn’t have to pay extra for them.
Value (at time of assessment): $398 (mfr. est., as examined)

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