CQ57-229WM Unexpectedly nice notebook

So, my sister had a series of unfortunate events occur. One of those events was the destruction of her laptop (her only PC). I had planned a visit to the family and I was determined to leave her with a functioning PC. I found nothing of use in her old one. I had brought an ACER ONE with me to give to her, but just in my getting it ready for her the single core 1.6GHz Atom was not cutting it at all. HD video was completely unplayable. So I went trolling locally and came across the CQ57-229WM… Yes, the WM at the end stands for Wal-Mart. If anyone would have ever told me I would buy a computer at Wal-Mart, I probably would have laughed hysterically then been highly offended. However, the specs seemed good for the price, I was only hesitant due to the 1GHz processor, but it was a dual-core and had 2GB ram and all other niceties of a notebook over a standard netbook. After verifying with two employees that I could return it if it proved to be a dud, I decided to try it.

The unboxing of a new electronic anything is fun and exciting for me. I can easily appreciate ultra powerful PCs, but I can also really appreciate ultra efficient, clean, no frills tech as well. This notebook fell in the latter category. It took me about two hours to remove all the crap-ware and strip it to just the OS and the necessities, update drivers and patches, install VLC and other useful non-bloated tools. I removed the 45 day Norton and just setup MS Security Essentials. Once the trimming down was done, the little AMD C-50 seemed to spring to life and ran everything I threw at it. I was a believer. For the price of a netbook she gets a DVD writer and a 15.6” screen. It even comes with a “free” version of MS Word and Excel that puts ads in a corner of the document window, not bad actually, and easy to ignore the ads.

I still find it amazing that so much usefulness can be found for so little cost. This actually has much better video than notebooks at twice the price, the real limitation is the processor speed, and if you are only playing movies, surfing, word processing, Facebook and such, this is a fantastic cheap notebook.

 

I'd suggest getting OpenOffice (openoffice.org) instead of MS office. It's much less bloated and has no ads, and is compatible with ms office.

I was also considering buying a similar model and installing a used CPU I have to upgrade it. Still might do so, but I'll mention that these are disposable computers. Even the smallest problem would be far to expensive to fix to be worth it, but if that's what you want, then it's probably well worth the price... $250 for the model I was looking at, how much was yours?

 

It was $250 on clearance. I had thought of putting Open Office on it, as that's what I use at home, but the Word Starter isn't bad, and the ads really aren't in the way. I also wanted it to get updates with the rest of the MS stuff.