I'll stick with my Asus G51 Gaming monster, thanks. The kiddies can have that cheapo.

Hard to beat pricewise. It's even cheaper than the netbooks which we expected to be half that price!

Same price as a netbook for more screen, a real keyboard, and a noticeable mount of extra processing and GPU power. Looks like a cheap win to me.

Wow. That's incredible. I shelled out $1400 in 1989(?) for my x286 with 32MB HD. I don't remember how many kilobytes of ram it had ...

Vista? No thanks.
Norton? Is the system too fast or something?
Compaq? I'll recommend it to people I don't like.
Nvidia 8xxx series laptop chips? I hope this isn't a clean-out of the last of the bad batch.

The rest of the specs seem adequate for a budget laptop but it's obviously not something that will replace the portability of a netbook.

Hate Compaq if you want, but that's a good deal.

No need for your uppity comment. Thumbs down.

I couldn't believe it when I saw it had a dedicated graphics card. Great deal, but I wonder what the battery life is like.

you forgot the rest..."at that's just a small sample of the battery and performance killing bloatware you receive absolutely free!"

I wonder how many underpaid overworked people from third world countries it took make this? -_-

Reformat with Windows 7 or put XP on it until October 22.

I'd call it an appropriate cost for something basic, so if it fits your needs, good buy. I'd buy this before I'd ever buy a netbook, that is, if I actually shopped at Wal-Mart. Still, I'll take my Dell Studio XPS 13 over it any day.

That's a pretty good deal. I'm staying away mainly because it comes with sempron instead of a dual-core.

Love them or hate them,there is no denying this is an amazing price !!!

Awesome Laptop for the price.

Come on Sempron? No thanks. Rather have a dual core atom.

This price was attainable buying amd dumping excess unsold stock in a recession and outdated chips, the supply won't last forever. You will come for the 300 dollar laptop but will buy the 500 dollar one when you find out its sold out. That is at least the hope of the walmart/best buy marketing teams.
Knowing my family, they will probally buy three after me telling them they are crap.

Too bad its got one of the retarded 16:9 screens...

I'll stick with actually having a life instead of thinking a laptop can game, they can't and never will.

I have a desktop replacement gaming laptop and hate it, I would much rather have something with enough power to run windows 7 smoothly, play 1080p movies smoothly, and enough battery life to get through ONE movie, atleast 3 hours of battery life at load. I bet your "monster" G51 can't do that.

Hopefully nobody will get trampled. Too soon?

Actually this days many laptops game just fine as long as they are well specced a laptop with a 1440x900 -1680x1050 resolution and anything above the gtx 260m or even the 9800m gts will play the latest games very well and since these kinds of laptops are meant to be desktop replacements the whole point of battery life is moot, secondly newer gaming laptops come with good processing power as well...i am not knocking desktops but these days good gaming laptops do the job just fine not everyone wants a desktop taking space.

Gotta love the included "HP Games powered by Wild Tangent" LOL

My Dad's been searching endlessly for a cheap, basic laptop. $500 was too much... $400 was too much... Netbooks were too small... Maybe now, at $300, he'll finally get off his cheap and buy one!

Aww is this also for americans only? (i'm canadian) and since when was BB selling acers for 300 bucks? I've subscribed to their emails and they've never notified me...

well too late I spent my 300 on a asus eepc...Dropped xp and installed 7. It does what I need it to. If I need power I use my desktop...

But can it play Crysis?

...
If you want absolute min specs... -_-

Yes! I can finally see it, the end of netbooks is comming. Companies have finally realized they can easily make a real laptop and sell it for as cheap as the current netbooks.

Netbooks.. bah. I think most people buy netbooks for the same reason they bought a Wii. Low starting price and an emotional reaction to how different they are. But once they sink thier teeth into it they have to ask "where's the beef"?

The CPU is not a Celeron. Its an AMD64 single-GPU class chip, its given the Sempron name because its LOW-END by todays standards. Its performance is slight better than a desktop Pentium 4 630 (3.0Ghz).

It runs Vista okay. Its IMPORTANT to know if this notebook includes the FREE upgrade to Windows7 (which would help). For $300, its a good deal. It's NOT a $500~700 notebook... but for $300, not bad.

Acer has a notebook that normally goes for about $350, the Acer Aspire 5515. which is an Amd Athlon 2650e 1.6ghz... and its EASILY slower than this Compaq.

This site has the best info on notebook CPUs & GPUs:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobil [...] 436.0.html


For $300, not bad at all.

That is actually a great deal.

Sorta wish the cpu was at least a dual core...my brother got a dirt cheap Acer that came with a low clocked 1.9ghz AMD dual core and it performs great for all the everyday tasks that my brother does...besides that, there is no beating this price...

That's a great deal for a laptop - as long as it lasts a while.

I don't know how reliable Compaqs are though.

Of course, for the amount you paid for your "Gaming monster" with a rebadged two year old 8800 GT, you could have bought yourself a netbook (or one of these) and built yourself a more accurately termed "gaming monster" machine with SLI/Crossfire and had enough left over to buy a decent enough screen.

Good buy, get it and replace Millennium II with Ubuntu and you are good to go. If I didn't have my cheap 14" Acer (Ubuntu is on it) I would probably do that.