Compaq Armada M700

In the past, the Compaq Armada notebooks that have been submitted for review were mostly slow and cumbersome. Compaq has bucked this trend with the M7OO, which is neither lethargic nor chunky. It is the slimmest unit in this
review, 1.1cm thinner than the next slimmest notebook.
The review unit sent to APC was an engineering sample, and therefore not quite up to the standard of the retail product, which should be available by the time you read this. Despite this handicap, its performance was very strong in our tests.
It was almost the fastest in the Ziff-Davis CPUmark 99 test, and equal first with the Dell and NEC in the FPU WinMark. It dropped the ball with the Business Winstone 99, coming equal second last, but bounced back in the hard drive tests.
The 12G hard drive scored highest in the Business Disk WinMark 99 by a fair margin, and came second in the High-End Disk WinMark 99 with a highly respectable score.
You can’t fault
this unit for graphics oomph either. Its results were extremely high in both the Business and High-End Graphics WinMark 99 tests,
and very good in the 3D Mark 99 Max test. The slimness of the notebook makes the 14.1 in TFT screen seem larger than it is, and it is a |oy to watch DVD movies on. With a TV-out port, you can even watch those movies on your lounge room TV, or show presentations on a big screen.
Even though this notebook is fast, light and slim, its battery is nothing to boast about. It only lasted two hours and 20 minutes. This is the shortest life span of any of the notebook batteries and not nearly enough for the road warrior who has long gaps between power points. However, Compaq has done something right with the Armada M700; it may be costly, but you get power in a slim form.