Digital Trends

Compaq Presario R3000

August 2nd, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Testing and Usage

As we mentioned before, the keyboard really has a nice, soft feel to it and typing is comfortable, with plenty of room to rest your wrists. The ALPS pointing device is also simple to use and your finger glides easily across the surface. The two mouse buttons feature a rubberized center which felt strange at first, but became very useful as we found it easy to get a good grip on the button with your thumb.

The right side of the touchpad features an up and down scroll bar, allowing you to scroll through documents or Web pages with your finger. This takes some getting used to though, because if you don't apply the right pressure to the scroll pad, the mouse will move up or down instead of actually scrolling the application window. Using the scroll pad with the same hand as you use the touch pad with may be a bit uncomfortable at first, but we soon got used to it and thought the function was quite useful.

One annoyance with the touchpad was its sensitivity when typing. Inadvertent thumb or finger presses while typing would move the mouse all over, often clicking out of input boxes or moving our cursor to an unwanted location of our document. This is easily fixed by selecting the “Hide pointer while typing” in the pointer configuration options, which prevents inadvertent tapping while typing. This feature worked and stopped that annoying behavior, but it was not turned on by default. The ALPS software also allows you to set up mouse gestures, such as tapping a corner to bring up the shortcut menu. While this was a nice feature, it will probably go unused by most. Finally, the touchpad has an on/off button which allows you to turn it off while using a USB mouse or typing.

The ALPS touchpad on the R3000 features soft, rubberized buttons, a scroll pad, and an on/off button.

ATI's Radeon 9000 IGP is an integrated graphics processor, meaning that it is not upgradeable and it shares memory with the system memory. The Radeon 9000 can be configured in the BIOS to use 16, 32, 64, or 128MB of memory and ours was pre-configured with 128MB. 32MB was more than adequate for every application we tried except for gaming. DVDs, graphics applications, Web graphics and digital movies worked perfectly with the 32MB setting. We watched movies using all three options — a VGA monitor, a TV hooked up to the S-Video port and on the laptop screen itself, and all looked excellent.

We also did some gaming with the Radeon 9000 at the 128MB setting, having no problems playing games such as Call of Duty and Painkiller. Granted, we weren't able to crank all of the resolution and eye-candy settings up, but the games were certainly playable and enjoyable. Maps sometimes take a while to load because the shared memory only leaves you with 384MB of system memory, but this is not meant to be a high-end gaming laptop.

Wireless performance with the Broadcom internal 54G mini PCI card was average and we have no complaints about it. We hooked up to a variety of 802.11b and 802.11g routers and networks, secure and not-so-secure and the card did a good job of obtaining and keeping a connection. We even found it to be better than the external D-Link DWL-G650 and Compex Waveport at obtaining a signal after coming out of standby. The Broadcom instantly connected to the network each time, while the others took a good 10 or 20 seconds to reconnect. The Broadcom card also did well at longer distances, keeping a steady signal at distances where the Compex and D-Link would start to fluctuate.

CD burning worked well too as the combo DVD reader and CD writer by Teac (model DW-224E-A) was able to burn CDs at 24x. The computer includes Roxio's Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 Basic Edition, and all of our writes with that and Nero's Burning ROM application were successful.

Battery life is often hard to quantify because of the different peripherals, settings and usage options. We were able to consistently get just over three hours with what we call “normal use” — which includes Web browsing and office applications. Intel's mobile Pentium 4 technology adjusts processor speeds as needed and the proper settings can help extend your work time. The Presario R3000 comes with an 8-cell lithium-ion battery but can be upgraded to a 12-cell version.

We compared the R3000 to a few other notebooks, most notably the Dell Inspiron 8600, which has similar features and the same LCD screen. The Inspiron was decidedly heavier and the plastic was more susceptible to scratches. Compaq's R3000 weighs in at around eight pounds, depending on your configuration.