Are you happy with your Compal?

Hi,

I've been looking at laptops for the past several weeks since I'm in the market to buy one and I thought I had finally decided on the Compal HEL80 but it seems everytime I read these forums something is going wrong with it. Little things like the keyboard is too bouncy and requires tape to be stable (seems tacky to have to do that on an expensive pc like this), screen and keyboard not always working on bootup, etc. I came across the HP nc8430 a few days ago and it seems to be pretty high quality, the only problem is it's a fair bit more expensive, I could get a compal for the same price with a lot better specs. So do you guys have any regrets with your purchase or are these issues I mentioned just little things that don't really matter?

Thanks

 

I think most people are happy with their compal notebooks. I'm sure I will really like my HGL30 if I ever get it. Keep in mind the purpose of those threads is to ask questions, get answers, see if others are having similar problems, etc. So of course you are going to hear about issues - all laptops have them. Those issues you mentioned are pretty minor or nonexsistent for most, like I think the tape thing was for ones that did not have some screws in place. As for problems after coming out of standby, I dont know why that is but I have seen similar issues on quite a few other newer laptops lately.

 

The tape thing on the HEL80 definately applies to those who had the screws in place. It actually makes things much better, i have to admit. With regard to my overall satisfaction i am very happy with it. I like the WSXGA+ Matte screen, performance and build alot. Its a bit heavier than some though.

 

As someone who has had both the keyboard and screen not working issues, let me just say that if I were offered my money back right now, I would still keep my HEL80.

Nothing is perfect; everything has its little problems. I actually kind of like the little bounce that is in the keyboard. To me, it makes it seem more like I'm typing on a regular keyboard than the tabletop impression some laptop keyboards can give.

The screen not working and keyboard issues are fairly rare, and only seem to happen when resuming from hibernation. They're annoying when they do happen, but there's always hope that Compal will release a fix.

Bottom line, if you do get a HEL80, you'll be getting a good laptop with a few quirks, but at least you'll know what to expect; a "the enemy you know is better than the enemy you don't" kind of thing.

 

Thanks for the responses, they are reassuring and I think I'll still go with buying it. Any other advice would still be appreciated.

 

I am very, very happy with mine. I have not done the tape job, and don't plan to, since I do not think my keyboard is bouncy enough to warrant it. Then again, I am not a tinkerer.

The matte screen is to die for; after using it for two and a half weeks, I am still oohing and aahing over it.

 

i have the HGL-30 and absolutly love it. There are some problems like a bouncy keyboard but i dont think that for me at least that its a very big deal so i can say without a doubt that i have absolutly no regrets about my notebook purchase

 

I've been saying that the HEL80's keyboard is a little bouncier than normal...but all keyboards on laptops are bouncy. I was in COMPUSA today and gave each keyboard a test. They all flex/bounce.

Maybe the HEL80's is a little more bouncy than some, but definitely not so much to say it's unusable. I have not taped my keyboard down, since it doesn't bother me and I generally don't like to type on laptop keyboards anyway (use an external full-size and mouse as often as I possibly can).

As far as the hibernation thing goes, it's probably more of a Windows-thing...and it's one that I haven't seen myself yet after over a month. I generally shut my laptop down though rather than let it idle for hours.

EDIT: Oh and yes, flip through the forums, and you'll see that every model has it's quirks. I'm actually quite happy that this one has relatively few. My last laptop had BSOD 2-3 times a day right out of the box.

EDIT: Paladin mentioned in the HEL80 owner's lounge that the keyboard/black screen issues have been sent in for fixes and that he'll post them once he gets them in that thread.

 

Hey I gotta question, I ordered my laptop and I just wanna know how long standard shipping (for those of you who got it) takes?

 

It is tough to answer that when we don't know where it is coming from, or where it is going.

 

I live in chicago..

 

Ok, that is the to...what is the from City and State?

 

Where are you guys shipping out from? I ordered it from you guys. Man you reply fast!

 

I couldn't tell who you ordered it from based on your Avatar...or your email address

UPS Ground shipping takes 4 business days (don't count Saturday or Sunday) to Chicago.

 

Really.. thanks! Sorry about that! I kinda... well its late.

So I ordered it last monday so I can expect it.. this friday?

 

Specific details about your order should be addressed to your Sales Advisor.

As I said in my earlier post, I have no idea who you are and cannot determine it by your Avatar or the email address that you have here at NBR.

 

I am very happy with my Compal, only 2 things annoy me, the uncontrolable fan (would love to see some kind of fan control) and the noisy audio outpunt when using the battery (not always noisy though, which is even more annoying).

 

The last scan on my package is less than 20 miles away, and it is currently set at "out for delivery," so I should be receiving my laptop today. I'll post my first impressions either later today or sometime tomorrow.

 

I've tried to listen for that battery audio noise, but I don't hear anything. Either my hearing is bad (which it shouldn't be), some of you have exceptional hearing, or there's nothing wrong with my laptop as far as making that high-pitched sound when running on battery.

 

As a new laptop user, I am very happy with my new Compal HEL80. Everything I've tried so far has worked fine. I too have noticed the keyboard flex, but it put to be common to all laptops, so I haven't put any tape on mine yet. As my sales rep (Ron Baird) says, if it works, don't mess with it.

I really like the matte screen. When I was looking at various screens, glossy ones had too much reflection--I didn't like looking at myself all the time. Mine had zero stuck pixels according to DPT.

One of the major reasons I got the laptop was to get reasonable graphics performance. I am not an FPS game person, but I do use a radio control flight simulator (RealFlight G3), and this laptop works fine with it.

As far as the audio goes, I feel the internal speakers are about as good as I had hoped for, and I don't hear any extraneous noises.

My 3dMark05 score is 3107, and SuperPi does 2 million digits in 2 min flat.

Heat with this laptop is not a problem. The fan noise is just about non-existent except when something is starting up. The AC power brick gets warm, but not what I'd call hot.

Hope this helps!

 

Very happy. First laptop so I have nothing to compare it to. Only 2 things I dislike is the fact that the Fn key and the ctrl key are switched around. I'm adjusting. The second thing is the keyboard. Other then that, I'm thrilled!

jonFREY

 

I just got it today. So far it's running great; I'll post more later. The thing that stood out the most for me was the great quality of the Matte screen. When I stand to either far side, I can still see the screen lit up bright and clear (it doesn't get dark/distorted like most laptop LCDs).

 

I've had mine for about two weeks and so far its good.

The finger print thing is good. Decent gpu, i can play most games on medium to high settings.

 

The HEL80 is a great machine. The keyboard is atrocious (even with the screws in), but everything else is super high grade. Powernotebooks.com and Donald (Paladin here) offer great terms on their laptops and superb service. In spite of the keyboard I'd buy an HEL80 again.

 

I'm probably gunna get an external keyboard for it for school. Typing on laptops in general is harder than on nice big keyboards

 

Although the keyboard does show very noticeable signs of flex/bounce, it doesn't impede the utility of it as a keyboard. In fact, I think the spacing of it more closely resembles that of my desktop keyboards than any other laptop I've used, so I don't find myself making typos very often.

 

Not sure how to answer this question, for the time I had it I thought it was a good laptop, very well built and sturdy. When you compare it to say a Dell or Compaq it feels like it is better built and will hold up better. The long feature list is what drove me to get this laptop to begin with, and things were fine other then the couple quarks mentioned elsewhere on this section of the forums. But now I am wishing I had gone another route, after alittle less then a month of ownership the laptop stopped tracking time when it was off, in 6 years of repairing computers at a local computer store I have never seen that happen, and neither had the other technician there who has more time repairing then me. So contacted the seller and got an RMA and sent it in, they checked it out and found a defective motherboard, which was what we thought before sending it in. Now here I am going for over a week and no idea when I will get it back, now I fully understand these things do go bad, there is no perfect computer out there but even knowing that so far I am getting a very uneasy feel about the laptop. Between a motherboard going bad and the other odd quarks that seem to plauge the laptop I don't think I would buy another if given the option and probably would have gone with one of the new MSIs when they had come out or Asus.

 

Well, aurawolf, all I can really say is don't worry too much. I've done a bit of searching around, and from what I can tell yours is the only case like this that I can find. What that tells me is it's an extremely uncommon issue, and doesn't reflect on the laptop. Sometimes parts just aren't manufactured to par - that's the nature of mass production. Hopefully you'll get your laptop back soon and in working order.

 

Err... are you sure that SuperPi is correct? It shouldn't take longer than 1 min 30 secs at the very most, and likely below that. Perhaps you were running heavy applications at the same time?

C.

 

1 minute and 26 seconds on a T2400 (1,83ghz).

 

hmm i get 1 min 17 with a 1.83

 

ahhh i love it so far.. built in camera AND mic! so many cool features

 

i love my hgl30 so far Thanks to donald and powernotebooks for great service!

 

claudione314, TC03, and jterp7:
Didn't notice I had the CPU on dynamic switching, and it was spending most of the time at 997 MHz and very little on 1.83 GHz. On max performance at 1.83 my super-pi time for 2M is 1 min 24 sec. Thanks for the follow-up.

 

Figured that would be the problem, had the exact same thing as you. The score I posted was my 2nd shot.

 

No prob, eggum, same thing happened to me with a Pavilion zv6000... couldn't figure out why it was taking nearly 3' to complete SuperPi, until I realized it was running at 997 Mhz. When I brought it back up to 2 Ghz (Athlon 64 3200+) it scored around 2'25"... Still unimpressive, but oh well.

I'm very nearly decided on the Compal HEL80 by now... but matte or glossy? matte? glossy? glossy? matte? ARGH!

C.

 

Think about, do I want higher or lower resolution? WXGA vs WSXGA+? 1680x1050 vs 1280x800?

 

Good question. I finally decided that after looking at the new Dells at the local mall kiosk, I wanted the matte and WSXGA+, so decided on the HEL 80. The Dell kiosk is right under a skylight, and the glossy (TrueLife) was like looking at myself in a mirror. Not a good impression! But I haven't taken mine outside yet. The jury may still be out....

 

See, that's not a huge deal for me. Higher resolution does not necessarily mean better quality. For one, I am worried about resizing/downscaling: no matter how OC'ed, the Go7600 in the HEL80 won't be able to play recent games at native WSXGA+ with details on, but it will at native WXGA. Some say resizing does not affect quality; others say it does. In my experience, it depends on the game, but it definitely can, so that's a potential problem. And then, matte and glossy deliver different performance in terms of color, contrast, and response time. Hence my doubt.

C.

 

what's more important to you?? color vibrance for dvd viewing/gaming or the extra real-estate for graphing/spreadsheets, etc??
I kept hearing good things about the wsxga matte screen but decided against it becuase for one, I watch dvds quite often on my computers and two, the whole deal with native resolution and gaming.
I hope that helps, if any at all.

 

the high res screen is bad for dvd watching then ? i see nothing wrong with it. watched many movies on it allready.

 

I've also gamed on my WSXGA+ at native resolution. I don't need to turn down the settings too much. Actually it can run at max settings on the games I've tried so far, but at some points there can be a little slowdown. Turning down/off AA and some detail/texture settings will get rid of this problem.

And I haven't overclocked at all.

 

i never said the high res was bad for dvd watching. I was actually referring to the "matte" part of the high res screen because I personally feel that DVD's on glossy screens cannot be beat. Sorry for the mixup

 

Just out of curisosity, does your guys laptops creak as in Hel 80? Mine creaks under the panel of the hard drive when I push at it. Do you guys have any other places that creak on the laptop? I still love it but at times its kinda of annoying.

 

What version of the BIOS are you running? Mine is currently set to dynamic switching, but the only other option I see in the BIOS is "Always Low."

 

He probably used NHC to switch to max performance.

 

It sounds like a lot of people with the HEL80 are getting errors when they try using NHC. Or is it just a specific version of NHC that causes the problems?

 

for me, the latest version.

 

traveling through Zepto(Compal) site i found something related to the HIBERNATION issue, several people complained...:

ftp://ftp.zepto.dk/WindowsXPfix/HibernationIssue/

hope this solves it.

 

Here are my thoughts about the HEL80 after 12 days of tinkering and playing on it:

The Bad:​

~ Keyboard is kinda noisy and bouncy. I don't really mind it, because it's actually very easy to type on (So this really isn't a negative). But I came from an IBM... there's room for improvement in the noise department. I personally think the control key is too small (I don't mind the switched FN and CTRL keys)... actually the whole keyboard could be bigger because it has an inch of room left on the left and right sides, allowing for bigger keys (such as shift on the right side, the arrow keys, and the ctrl key). And on a general note, I hate the windows key. On all keyboards. I wonder if they make keyboards with out it...

~ The speakers are weird. It's probably just a software problem, but in Counter Strike, the sounds come from the opposite (and wrong) speaker. So when I heard a shot from the right, I had to turn left. Switching the audio settings to "headphones" fixed this problem.

~ Obviously the underclocked GPU. While not completely a negative, some people really don't want to mess with their brand spankin' new notebook too much. Especially if they don't know what they're doing... so if there isn't a need to do it, don't. I might over clock it later a little bit later to get higher FPS on those hdr levels in Counter-Strike: Source, since right now my fps can dip pretty low in those levels (in a first person shooter, 20 is a tad too low). But even then, it still plays newish games like Counter Strike: Source and Age of Empires III very well.

The Good:​

~ Nice nice screen. The thing I like about mattes vs. glossies is that mattes aren't as bright, and at full brightness, this screen is PERFECT. It doesn't strain my eyes at all, even with the slightly smaller text (higher res = smaller text). Glossies, on the other hand, at full brightness, are blinding. So this is perfect.

~ Fingerprint scanner. It's just fun, and keeps my bro outta my computer. I got my thumb and both index fingers workable now. Cool.

~ Good price. Besides S96j, you probably (from most resellers) won't find a better deal on a notebook with these specs. Unless you get a desktop.. but really, who wants one of those.

~ Battery life (with 9 cell). Even when playing games I got a good few hours.

~ (Powernotebooks.com) Donald Stratton and the customer service at Powernotebooks.com. Ordering this laptop was easy, and were very generous, helpful, and knowledgable about what they were doing. Very snappy in responding to emails. A+ service

The Ugly:​

~ NOT this laptop. It's very industrial looking in my opinion.. I like it. And it's built very solidly too.

~ NOT the cool lights, like the WLAN indicator and the power button, which are white and orange.. it looks nice.

Overall Impression and Grade​

A​

~ Very nice looking and performing computer
~ Nice battery life even when playing games
~ Fingerprint scanner! Nuff said.
~ No bloatware! WOO! Down with dell!

(This is by no means a review, but just a look at some points about this laptop.)