Compaq R3240US First Impressions

I bought a Compaq R3240US from Best Buy and received rebates for $30 and $150 (or will receive I should say). Price after rebate was $1349.

First thing I noticed was that the touchpad takes a lot of getting used to. It is made by ALPS, and I was used to a Synaptic. The ALPS does not seem to have a scroll to end feature. It also doesn't seem to have the response and feel that the Synaptic did. Ergonomics are a bit different in that they keyboard is a bit of a reach. The keys though do have a nice springy feel to them and not too noisy.

One thing I missed from my zt1145 is the upfront display that showed battery charge ststus. However, this can be accessed from the control panel easily. The display came set up at WUXGA resolution, but it looks much better at WXGA resolution.

The Athlon 64 performs well under XP, although it seems to run most of the time at 800 MHz. I have seen it go up to 2GHz before. I have the power configuration set to Always On, and it still shows 797 MHz. Not sure why that is.

The wireless LAN works pretty good and has decent range. The sound of the notebook is very very good. Much better than my zt1145. I am getting used to the silver color and the case is nice and well constructed. Overall, I'd say that I'll keep it. I would like to figure out the Athlon CPU speed issues, so if anyonehas any input, I'd appreciate it.

I did look at eMachines. They had a 6810 on display with cracked hinges.

As to Best Buy, it was evident that they were irritated that I did not purchase the extended warranty, and even more so that I did not purchase their $89 Internet Security pack. They warned me that I would get all these worms once I connected to the Internet. However, anyone computer savvy knows to install AntiVirus software before connecting. The notebook came with Norton AntiVirus 2004. It also comes with a several week trial of MS Office.

One other note, I went to CompUSA first and all they had was the demo and refused to discount it.

 

Get the current Athlon 64 processor drive and see if that helps. Get MobileMeter too, WinXP usually doesn't display the CPU speed correctly (Windows bug). I recommend using Portable/Laptop rather than Always On.

So long as you're firewalled and have a decent AV program running you're reasonably safe from worms. The firewall matters more than anything else.

In Control Panel | Power Options | Advanced tab, "Always show icon on the taskbar" should be selected. You might want to disable Hibernate too (I prefer Suspend-to-RAM, which is what Standby will do when Hibernate is off).

Get all the current Windows Updates before you do anything else if you haven't already done so.

 

Another observation is that I cannot install Linux as it does not recognize the ALPS touchpad. Does anyone know of a workaround or driver?

 

Plug in a USB mouse. That's what I did. FC2 will let you install without a mouse but only in text mode but I prefer graphical mode.

I never did get around to getting the touchpad working or my Bluetooth mouse (Bluetooth takes a LOT of work under Linux but I did get as far as Linux seeing the mouse, so I know it's possible).