Compaq Presario Media Center C300EU

**I apologise for the length of the review, but I wanted to give a thorough, honest account of most (if not all) major components to this laptop.**

I received this laptop as a Christmas present back at the end of 2006, and it was purchased for £450. I've been using it almost everyday since it's purchase, and it has both it's benefits and faults about it.

First of all, I cannot comment honestly on portability and battery ...
...I only ever use my laptop where there is mains power, and I most certainly don't carry it everywhere with me.
However, when travelling to and from my flat to my parents it has been no trouble at all as far as weight's concerned. When closed the laptop is no more than 1 1/2" in height, and without the battery, while it surely isn't the lightest and most portable around, it's certainly not going to cause arm ache after prolonged carriage.
more

**I apologise for the length of the review, but I wanted to give a thorough, honest account of most (if not all) major components to this laptop.**

I received this laptop as a Christmas present back at the end of 2006, and it was purchased for £450. I've been using it almost everyday since it's purchase, and it has both it's benefits and faults about it.

First of all, I cannot comment honestly on portability and battery power, as I am yet to even connect the battery- I only ever use my laptop where there is mains power, and I most certainly don't carry it everywhere with me.
However, when travelling to and from my flat to my parents it has been no trouble at all as far as weight's concerned. When closed the laptop is no more than 1 1/2" in height, and without the battery, while it surely isn't the lightest and most portable around, it's certainly not going to cause arm ache after prolonged carriage.

Aesthetic wise, as with everything to do with this laptop it's not the best, but it's more than enough. What you cannot see in almost all images of the product is that the outer shell is a practical, deep blue, matt finish plastic, which is much harder wearing than the attractive silver finish in the inner sections.
However, saying that I managed to leave some nasty scratches on the top side by dragging the rough side of velcro along it, but it came off better than the silver surfaces would have.

The keyboard has resisted a lot of use, and while I don't use the mouse touchpad anymore, it was very accuracte when I used to use it, along with the very convenient scrolling borders to it.
Unfortunately though, through use the silver colour has been tarnished a little by skin oils, so in some lights the touchpad goes a duller colour, as does the silver plastic where your wrists typically rest when typing. While it's not a big deal, if you're a bit of a perfectionist like me you'll find it annoying.

The screen is a brilliant size and anybody unsure about the widescreen format shouldn't be worried- the only problems I get are with games that don't support widescreen resolutions, and overall it takes very little getting used to. In fact, the extra width comes in very useful for various things, such as having two or more windows display side by side.
As opposed to normal LCD screens, the display on the C300 is a "crystal" surface, as opposed to the normal matt-type surface to most LCDs.
While this doesn't make a massive amount of difference the display does seem to be slightly crisper than a typical LCD, and although I may be wrong in saying this as fact, to me it seems that the screen performs better on lower brightness settings, giving your eyes a good break from the constant glare of bright, pure white.
The crystal screen does have a drawback though, with reflectivity. If there is a strong light source nearby- be it a light above or behind you, or sunlight in a bright room, you will no doubt struggle a little with the reflectiveness. Of course, there are easy ways around this, but it can be a problem nonetheless.

Now for the computer as an actual computer. Performance wise it is great- while the processor isn't the fastest on the market, this particular Intel (T1300) has a 2mb L2 cache along with it's 1.66Ghz processing power. I'm not an expert when it comes to these things, but I've been told that a larger cache allows for more processes to be temporarily stored, and be recalled quicker, which improves the system's performance in comparison to processors with smaller caches.

You will find that 1gb of DDR2 RAM is brilliant in the set up, although it is quite easy (and cheap) to upgrade to 2gb of DDR2 notebook RAM, should you really want or need to... but for a medium-heavy user like me, who doesn't use the computer for high spec gaming, the 1gb installed will do you just fine!

Same can be said for the 80gb hard drive- however, you technically only have 60gb to play with, as the system comes with a readily partitioned disk, where approximately 20gb is set aside for backing up. Unless you truly know what you're doing (unlike me), you are probably better off leaving the backup partition alone, and getting on with the 60gb available to you. Do take into account that the operating system and software eat into this 60gb however, leaving you with approximately 55gb from the start. Still, quite sufficient unless you have an awful lot of music/movies/documents.
The hard drive is nice and quick, and I have had no performance problems with mine to date.

The graphics card comes in the form of a 128mb shared Intel chipset, which means that, like 90% of computers, it utilises a portion of the RAM on your system, as opposed to being a standalone graphics processing unit.
To cut to the chase, this means this laptop cannot handle a fair deal of modern games - don't even THINK about playing Crysis - but on the other hand many of them can be handled at lower graphics settings- Civilization 4 for instance, works like a dream in the low end settings. The detailed graphics are a sacrifice that must be made for smooth gameplay, I'm afraid.

The wireless card preinstalled into the laptop doesn't seem to have the strongest receiver, but it does work very well on the whole- for the past year I have been using this with a wireless connection coming from the floor below, and only recently did I notice issues with staying connected, as I had to move away from the router. But, with a router in the same room, or I daresay on the same floor as you there should be no issues.

The combi-CD/DVD writer drive is excellent at writing CDs, and reading both CD and DVDs, but seems to fall over at writing DVDs.
I've no idea on the technological benchmark for DVD writing drives and their speeds, but I think it's a slight problem that, to write a DVD your system becomes almost unusable for at least an hour. This may be typical of DVD writers however, this might not be an issue just with this laptop.
The other problem with the drive is the noise it creates when reading or writing- with the speeds the reading gets to, at times it sounds like your laptop is preparing to take off!

One main issue I have with this laptop is it's ability to get quite hot. You will find that you have the Microsoft certificate sticker on the underside of the laptop, and my laptop has demonstrated the heats it gets to by partially MELTING this sticker. It also gets to temperatures where it can begin to irritate your skin should you work with the laptop on your lap, and the heating issues don't stop if you use it on a hard surface either- however, it doesn't get quite so hot.
Because of this, I would strongly recommend purchasing a laptop stand that has either cooling vents, or additional cooling fans built in, to allow greater air circulation to the bottom of your laptop. If you do this you will find that the secondary, noisier fan won't have to start up anywhere near as often!

Finally, an overview of some other parts of the laptop...
There are only two USB ports, which I find to be a problem with a USB mouse and a USB-power cooling fan on the laptop stand. Luckily though, the laptop does have a PS/2 port for mice, and USB splitters are very easy and cheap to get hold of.
The in-built speakers are good quality, although some tones in music create a nasty vibrating noise from within the laptop that taints the quality!
The lack of floppy disk drive isn't a problem at all, since all modern PCs and operating systems can boot from CD in the event of issues, so don't let this factor in.

Even including the faults I have identified, I am still more than happy to give this laptop a 5 star rating, due to the fact that it is a very robust system. Over the time that I've had it and been using it, I have had no hardware faults or failures, only faults induced by the user (myself!), or by forced, incorrect driver downloads by Microsoft.
A very useful system that can handle a lot of what you throw at it, and to be honest, only now are most laptops at similar specifications for a similar price.

Well worth every penny. 

...less