Good for the money, but overheats

Author's Rating:

Pros: Lots of features. Works great for most applications, especially for the price!

Cons: Overheats too easily and gets LOUD! Speakers are basic.

The Bottom Line: 
This laptop will work very well for you as long as you don't try to treat it like it's a high end graphics machine, because it's not.

Author's Review
I got this laptop in ~June 2004 from Circuit City for $600 after rebate, and I see you can't even get it at that price today in 2006 ($700 refurbished!?!). So the retailer messed up and I benefited.

This laptop has worked really well for me the last year and a half cruising the internet, MS Office, watching DVDs, even Google Earth and Civ IV with some performance hit because of the Intel integrated graphics chip (not upgradeable). But can I really complain about not having a great graphics card for the price? No.

What does suck is that the thing gets really hot easily and will shut down without saving. This usually only happens when doing something really graphics intensive (like Civ 4) where the Celeron processor (2.8 GHz!!!) has to pick up the slack from the low end graphics chip and it gets real loud and hot. If that happens, save fast or get it cold somehow.

The battery life is fine for normal stuff but graphics will chew it up.

The speakers are not great.

4 USB ports are good for lots of peripherals. I use a mouse, camera and printer at the same time.

Its a fairly big laptop. You don't want to carry it around town all day long.