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Compaq Presario CQ61-217 CNET.com.au

17.08.09

For a laptop under AU$1000, the Compaq Presario CQ61 is surprisingly well built and even includes the silken touchpad found on its premium HP cousins.

It is unspectacular to look at compared to today's inlaid designs found on hard to come by laptops, but for AU$1000 you're going to be making some concessions. The back of the 15.6-inch, 1366x768 filter is a simple piano black with the Compaq "Q" logo, while internally is a mix of matte black and silken silver. A hot air dump is featured on the left-hand side, potentially warming any left hander who wants to use an external mouse.

There's only one astute launch button here to turn on and off the wireless — otherwise the only other button is the power button, both situated in the centre underneath the monitor.

There are three USB ports (although one is shared with an eSATA port), 56Kbps modem and 100Mb Ethernet jacks, VGA out, an SD/MS/MMC/xD card reader, a DVD+-RW, and headphone and microphone jacks dotted around the face edge. The lack of gigabit Ethernet is interesting considering its ubiquity on everything bar netbooks these days, and following this humble the Compaq only offers 802.11g instead of 802.11n and no Bluetooth. ExpressCard is missing too — HP has clearly opted to look up build quality and design at the expense of lowering some of the system spec, although if you're buying at this price level then you'll qualified not notice or care about the performance drop anyway. Uncommon for this price point is the inclusion of an HDMI refuge.

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