Laptops Arena

Founded in February 1982, Compaq used to be one of the top computer manufacturers back then, especially when they launched a portable IBM personal computer in 1983 which was a great success and it sold 53000 units in that same year. As most of you may know, back in 2002, HP purchased Compaq. Compaq Presario is a series of laptops and desktop computers launched on the market in September 1993. The Compaq Presario 1700 was first produced 10 years ago and this is the Compaq model we are going to analyze today. This model is very old and you cannot expect good performance from it (alas, if you read some reviews, you cannot expect performance from most Compaq models).

Just like other models before it, the Compaq Presario 1700 laptop was designed for people who don't need proficiency in terms of performance or speed. It looks more professional than the Presario 1600 as it has a shiny silver look and big black buttons. Typing on the full-sized keyboard of the Presario 1700 is easy and pleasant and it reminded us of the regular computer keyboard typing experience. We were surprised to see that it's quite light for a notebook that size (2.36 kg in comparison with other laptops which are the same size and weight a bit more than 3 kg). You get a touchpad that has a four-way scroll button which can come in handy when you are surfing the internet or reading long documents. The display is 14.1 inched, smaller than that of a regular notebook. And yet again we are confronted with the problem of overheating and this is something you will notice on the left-hand palm rest. Very unpleasant, especially in summer time when your hands get all sweaty without even touching a hot laptop palm rest. One feature we found to be cool is that you can which drives without turning off the laptop. What we mean is you can swap the floppy drive with the DVD drive or the CD drive into an internal bay and can do all this while keeping your notebook turned on. Yes, we know nobody uses floppy drives anymore but you got to admit, swappable drives was a cool idea. You also have a parallel port for your printer and other two USB ports for attaching your digital camera, mouse or memory stick.

Intel Pentium III processor is something you won't be very happy about since technology has evolved a lot since 1999 but in that period you could handle most taking with this CPU. Another disappointment were the 64MB of RAM (that's right, I said 64 MB) which in our days and for our needs they are practically useless. You had the possibility to upgrade to 128MB or 256 MB of RAM but that could not help us much either. Without at least 1GB we are lost. We forgot to mention, the hard disk space is 12GB. Nothing we would buy nowadays. We have games that take up more free space than that (not to mention all the pictures we took on our last vacation, only they occupy 4GB of space). The battery performance is not what you would expect either. The battery life lasts charged for about an hour and 47 minutes while surfing the internet, checking e-mails and doing other mainstream tasking.

Browsing the internet, we've found some forum posts where persons have had some trouble with their Presario 1700 which keeps turning on and off. The laptop started to boot when they pressed the power on button but it shuts down after 5 seconds. This problem could be cause by a number of different factors, like overheating, RAM issues or problems with the power cord. If the connection between the cord and the plug in the computer is not tight, then the battery will run out, causing the computer to shut down. It will turn on when you press the ON button but there will not be enough battery power to boot up the system. If there was a problem with one of the hardware components, the laptop would normally inform you of hardware failure. By eliminating these problems we have come down to the heat issue. You could try to careful turn the laptop upside then remove the screws one by one and clean the fan with a fiber cloth or soft brush (if you don't want to mess with the parts inside the laptop, you could try cleaning the side vent with the vacuum cleaner or with a tube of compressed air that blows the dust away from the cooler). The problem could be more serious and there may be some melted parts in there. If the heat sink is separated from the processor that you have a big problem. You need to solder these two parts together and if you are not handy with the soldering gun, you may damage the processor of even hurt yourself. Better let a specialist take care of that.

Heat sink problems seem to be familiar to the Compaq Presario 1700 as we have found many customers that dealt with this issue. The symptoms may be different than the one we have told you before. The laptop may boot and you could even use it for a short while and then it may freeze or shut down without any previous warning. You may hear loud fan noises and your keyboard may also heat up, depending on the location of the processor inside the laptop. If you want to prevent overheating, it is recommended that you keep your laptop away from sun light or as far away from other heating sources as possible. You can take out the battery and keep the laptop plugged in because the battery heats itself as it charges.

Also make sure isn't anything blocking you laptops air vent because if the air can't come out of the laptop, you will be dealing with an overheated laptop. Or, better yet, take this piece of advice from us.  If you own a Compaq Presario 1700 laptop you may want to go out another laptop, a new one. Good manufacturers are offering great promotions and you can even buy a nice refurbished laptop if you don't have that much money to spend.