Okay, I’m now going to review the HP Compaq NC8230. This is a couple of years old now, but I don’t write it off as a bad laptop. So, the first thing we’re going to do is, as usual, take a look on the left side ports over here. We have a lock port, an Ethernet jack, dial-up, we have a S-video out, there’s fan or vent control here, 1394 firewire port, USB 2.0, SD and smart card and I guess there is a PCMCIAon this side.
On the very front now, we have the WiFi light, the power light, the battery charging light, and the hard drive activity light. This over here as you put—yeah, there it goes flashing again, there is the infrared. On the right side, we have one headphone out, we have a built-in microphone and a place to install another microphone, two USB 2.0. Now, this drive is the DVD reader but not the burner. They all read and burn CDs too, but you can get the DVD-RW from HP for a little bit more. Yes, I know it’s old fashioned, I’ve got a serial port here. On the back, there’s just VGA out and the power.
The cover is pretty self explanatory, strong enough. Advertises Hewlett Packard, serves its purpose. The screen is really one of the best things about this tube. It’s 1680 x 1050 wide screen. It’s not high definition, it’s not a bright view. But as you can see, I can support Windows arrow here. This is Vista Ultimate 32 bit. It can support Windows arrow to the fullest. Surprisingly, it only has a 64 megabyte graphics card by 80i. This has two gigabytes DDR, two memory in it, and a 120 gig after market Western Digital Scorpio hard drive.
The speakers are very loud and very nice, and notice they have a touch pad and a track pad, and I have a middle button here. I’ve set the middle button to go ahead and open up Windows Media Player, but that little button can be used as a scroll button or whatever you set it to in a specified driver.
Quick Launch, we have a button too opened up, a program of your choosing. I chose it to open up Mozilla Firefox. Here we go, come on. Anyways, this unit has a Bluetooth module and then as well as an internal wireless radio, obviously. Second button is for the WiFi. The third I set to open the reliability in performance monitor, but that can be user edited. Then we have a button to mute the speakers, up and down for the volume control.
So, it’s a Zen notebook. It’s pretty quick but it may not be like something like that or a Think Pad, but I think it’s close enough. The battery is great on this one, it’s a 9 cell. But when I was a bit disappointed—excuse me here; when I put Vista and obviously it’s designed for XPs, it’s only a 2.6, and the processor is Intel Pentium M at 1.86/87 gigahertz. So, it’s a solo core but it’s still a good laptop. So yes, I do recommend it. Just keep in mind it’s not the most up to date thing you can buy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad laptop.
So, thanks for watching the review of the HP Compaq NC8230.
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