To make a “fit” or “not a fit” judgment on the under $500 Compaq Presario notebook, you need to establish you analysis criteria. The major points of analysis are: operating system, processor, memory, hard drive, CD/DVD drive. In this article, I am looking at the Compaq Presario V6000.

When looking at the operating system for your Compaq Presario you must, in the new Vista world, pay attention to which operating system you are getting. No longer are there basically 2 Windows XP versions and later released Media Center Edition. It appears Microsoft initially proposed 7 versions but then whittled them down to 4. You must carefully look at each version because a Vista version does not exactly map to an XP version equivalent.

Second, the Compaq’s processor can make a huge difference in performance. The AMD Turion models have significant differences between one processor and the next level up. If you are not paying close attention, the slower processor (Turion 64 Mobile) has a higher clock speed than the better performing Turion 64 X2 dual core. The thing to remember is that the X2 is dual core which makes all the difference in performance. Over the single core Turion Mobile, the Turion X2 gives you better battery life, thinner, lighter and true multi-tasking.

Third, with the Compaq’s memory, keep in mind that you will be running Vista. A hate to break the news to you…but the under $500 option only has 512MB of memory. This is only a quarter of the amount of memory necessary for good performance out of Windows Vista.

Fourth, the hard drive size on the under $500 computer is somewhat small. It helps that HP usually gives you an upgrade to 80GB. Even with the upgrade, the drive is still somewhat small because Vista requires 40 of the 80 gigabytes.

Lastly, the CD/DVD drive is only a DVD player, CD player/writer. Surely in this day and time, you would want to have a double-layer DVD burner on your system.

So, you see, in the below $500 computer buy for the Compaq Presario, you will find yourself spending above that price just to get the features to support a normal computing lifestyle today.

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