Is the Compaq Evo n610c any good? How old is it? The reason I ask is my friend bought one off of ebay for $350. He had never used a laptop before, and wondered how to charge the battery. I told him, and I told him after you charge it; use it with out the AC adapter to see how long the battery lasts. Im just wondering on how good a computer he got.

 

yay Compaqs lol...i love Compaqs lol...anyways...should be pretty good...not the best...not the worst...what is he planning on doing it? and the battery will probably only last 1.5 hours or so...due to the P4...but what is he planning on doing with it?

 

He just plans on everyday use from doing bills, to surfing the web. No different than his PC. He wants to get rid of his PC and get another one for his wife, but I told him to keep the desktop as a back-up.

 

You have to watch out for the ebay laptops. Some of them do not come with batterys that hold a charge, meaning that it will have to be plugged in all the time. As far as the laptop goes, it should be alright.

 

They're decent machines, and the price is about right according to E-bay search. They are pentium 4's as mentioned above, with reasonable video. We had many of those deployed at our offices. The memory is easily upgraded, but the batteries are prone to failure.

You can go into the laptop bios and somewhere in there is a 'calibrate battery' option, or something like that. You have about a 50/50 chance of that helping, but it's worth a try.