The compaq Armada 1530D laptops have been out about 5 or 6 years now, first entering the market back in 1998, so its worth considering this throughout my review; this laptop is nothing compared with todays machines.
I bought the laptop used about one year ago, I needed a simple machine for ... Read review
(+) cheap,good after sell customer service cn up grade dvd to blue-ray and desent amt of ram (-) low battery life through with 4-cell,Small hard drive space if used to store lot of movies and mus
Advantages: cheap to buy used, robust Disadvantages: Heavy, slow, small hard drive
The compaq Armada 1530D laptops have been out about 5 or 6 years now, first entering the market back in 1998, so its worth considering this throughout my review; this laptop is nothing compared with todays machines.
I bought the laptop used about one year ago, I needed a simple machine for word processing at home, and decided it would be nice to socialise whil working (now I can sit in front of the telly with the family while I do ... ...truth is they are even cheaper on ebay now, I've seen them go as little as £100.
But of course, your not going to get an amazing machine for under £200. These laptops really are basic and have minimum specs. The speed is just 16MB RAM, which is minute compared with the speeds of 512MB RAM in the latest laptops. The harddrive is less than 2GB in size, incredibly small considering that recent laptops have hard drives beyond 50GB!! Its ... more
The compaq Armada 1530D laptops have been out about 5 or 6 years now, first entering the market back in 1998, so its worth considering this throughout my review; this laptop is nothing compared with todays machines.
I bought the laptop used about one year ago, I needed a simple machine for word processing at home, and decided it would be nice to socialise whil working (now I can sit in front of the telly with the family while I do my work) At £200 it was a bargain, the truth is they are even cheaper on ebay now, I've seen them go as little as £100.
But of course, your not going to get an amazing machine for under £200. These laptops really are basic and have minimum specs. The speed is just 16MB RAM, which is minute compared with the speeds of 512MB RAM in the latest laptops. The harddrive is less than 2GB in size, incredibly small considering that recent laptops have hard drives beyond 50GB!! Its also only a pentium one, which means software is really limited and the processor is extremely slow. Games are certainly a no no, I even tried earlier games like theme hospital and sim city but the graphics are very poor, thats if they load up at all.
The design of the laptop okay, Its black in colour which I suppose is better than grey ones out around the same time...which looked literally like breezeblocks! Its heavy too, at over 3kg. Its about 2 inches thick which is no where near as slim as the recent models (under 1 inch thick) The screen size is 12.5" which is fine for me, but again not as large as recent models.
I ask you again however to consider the age and price of the machine. At its time (in 1998) it would have cost over a grand and have been top of its range, but now6 years later technology has obviously moved on. This is no longer the dream machine it may have been in 1998 but its proved adequate for me. Yes its slow, weighs a tonne and has no storage but at the end of the day for £200 its proved fine for my daily word processing and spreadsheet tasks. If your looking for a simple computer for wordprocessing and the odd game of solitaire then this is fine. But if your looking to play the latest games, download hundreds of songs and watch DVDs then this isn't the machine for you (it doesnt have a DVD player for a start) So this perhaps isn't going to be the perfect computer for gamers and trendy students who want the best spec, but for anything else, and at under £200 this is an adequate machine for those not particularly bothered about being at the forefront of technology!
Well my dad brought home a laptop from work once. It had a Pentium 1 133mhz processor, 256 color display, and was running windows 98. My mum owned it for a while and mainly used it for the internet and a training CD Rom, but I soon aquired it.
I installed Windows NT on it and it worked a treat! With a few modifications Windows NT is like Windows 98 but much faster! It wasnt the fastest on this laptop but it was better than windows 98.
I had managed ... ...play them in full screen. It was useful for putting on a coffee table and showing pictures which were accessed through the network.
It was good for internet browsing up to a certain poiint, and at one time could even handle MSN 5.0 with webcam!!
When the external monitor was plugged in, it could manage 16bit colour display, which I supppose was quite impressive.
It had MSN 5.0 installed on it, and this worked fine. It also had office 2000 which ...
blackanddarkness 19.08.2004
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of Compaq Armada 1530
XGA (1024x768), SVGA (800x600), VESA BIOS VBE 2.0, SXGA (1280x1024)
Audio
Audio Output
Sound card
Compliant Standards
Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16/Pro
Audio Input
Microphone - integrated
Input device(s)
Type
Keyboard, touchpad
Operating system / software
OS Provided
Microsoft Windows 95
Software
Easy Internet Access, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, Drivers & Utilities, Compaq Insight Manager, Netscape Navigator, Just Connect
Manufacturer's product description
Compaq Armada provides the industry's best portable solution for the corporate environment by providing a complete line of corporate notebook products to meet every user need offering: stability and consistency, low total cost of ownership, superior manageability, and excellent reliability and support. Armada portables are designed and built with the highest quality and reliability standards. Vigorous testing along with reliability and durability features on certain products such as magnesium alloy casings for enhanced durability, shock mounted hard drives and built-in fault notification alerts on most or all models enable Armada users to be assured maximum productivity.
