Compaq Presario SR5710F Desktop Review

The Compaq Presario SR5710F Desktop computer is a computer with 2.3GHz AMD Athlon Athlon X2 4450e Dual-Core Processor, a 250 GB Hard drive and 4 GB of ram. This computer runs for about $369.99 dollars, it is black and gray and extremely light for a desktop computer. It has a DVD drive that can burn DVDs as well and several USB,Firewire and ethernet ports. It comes with Windows Vista installed and it Norton Anti-Virus free for 60 days.

Now that we got the technical specifications out of the way lets talk about the computer and how it runs. It is very fast, and it hasn't slowed down since I got it, unlike every other computer I have owned. Vista is really not as bad as people say it is. The only negative for me so far is that you have to "grant access" to every program that you open up.

Surfing the Internet is lightning quick as expected and streaming video is no problem at all. The 250GB hard drive is big enough for a base hard drive to run your fat and juicy programs on there, sound is great and graphics even better. This computer is definitely a great buy, but there are some problems.

First of all the thing is not really expandable at all. There's only two ram slots and you can't expand it more then 4GB. You can't add another internal hard drive unless you take out the DVD drive and I'm sure there are other limitations as well like the fact that you only have three modems slots instead of four. Well what if you have four different phone numbers from your business hooked up to your computer to run an automated call handling system? There's only three slots on this one. I'm sure the processor card isn't upgradeable.

The second problem with this machine is that when you plug in headphones and then say use a different pair of headphones it screws up the whole system and you have to close whatever program your in. You then have to restart the program or somethings even the whole computer. This is a real pain and I'm sure it's due to some new fancy updated sound card they came up with, but I prefer the old ones in this case.

In conclusion the Compaq Presario5710F desktop computer isn't a bad computer for family and home use. It will pretty much serve all your modern computing day needs. It is a good main work horse machine.