Product Reviews

The Armada 7400 is one of those rare notebooks that seems to have been designed in the school of hard knocks. The body of the case is rigid thanks to a combination of thick external mouldings and an intelligent design combining internal bracing with careful placement of the various cutaways so as not to weaken the integrity of the case as a whole. This is combined with an equally unyielding lid surface that'll help prevent the screen getting damaged when the machine is being transported.

Not surprisingly, Compaq sees this as a corporate desktop replacement, which explains the provision of Windows 95 or NT rather than Windows 98, the high price, and the sober, business-like styling of the case. Goodies are limited too, which makes sense when selling to large organisations who have their own ideas about what software is required. All you get is Windows, an on-line manual and a set of utilities, including SNMP-compatible network management, for configuration, diagnostics and asset tracking.

The machine comes with an internal K56/V.90 fax modem as standard, and you also get an adaptor that allows you to fit the DVD-ROM drive module into the spare drive bay of an Armadastation or Ministation docker, or indeed an Armada 7700 or 7800 series. The design allows for one drive at a time, in this case either the floppy module or the dual-speed DVD-ROM drive. Other options for the multipurpose bay include an LS-120 drive and a second hard disk, although you'll need a special adaptor to fit the latter. The 10Gb IBM Travelstar hard drive can also be removed, and it's protected against static damage during handling by casing covering the drive electronics.

There's nothing unexpected as far as ports and expansion are concerned, with the standard pair of Type II Card Bus PC Card slots to take care of add-ins, and the normal selection of ports augmented

An S3 Virge/MX chip fitted with 4Mb of RAM handles graphics, which enables the display of 24-bit colour at XGA resolution on an external monitor. There's no hardware assist for the DVD drive though, so decoding is entirely reliant on the processor. It's an arrangement that works reasonably well with fast CPUs like the Armada's, but you can't help but wonder why the best part of £3,000 doesn't cover an MPEG-2 decoder. I might also grumble about a few other things while I'm at it, like why this machine is fitted with the old-style Pentium II/366 with external cache and not the new PE processor with on-die Level 2, or why it only comes with 64Mb of memory. Leaving a SODIMM socket spare for an upgrade, as Compaq has thoughtfully done, isn't much of a substitute for 128Mb of RAM as standard. Particularly hard-to-please customers might even complain that a 14.1in screen would be more or less obligatory at this price point, and that the slightly dark, though otherwise perfectly serviceable, 13.3in XGA panel fitted falls short of the mark.

There's little wrong with the keyboard overall. It combines a spacious, logical layout with a welcome lack of function-doubling and large Enter and Backspace keys and spacebar. Its action is brisk and decisive, and the provision of tilt feet in the base improves the typing angle. The one thing I'm not happy with is the pointing device. Trackpoints are a personal matter and I can't get on with them.

Power management is handled by a Compaq-customised version of the Windows Control Panel Power utility, which lets you set the various timeouts and determine when the notebook enters its standby, suspend and suspend-to-disk modes. The lithium ion battery keeps everything going for up to two and a half hours, which is par for the course for a notebook in this category. The battery unit itself has a charge indicator LED scale, so there's no excuse for setting out with a dud.

The Armada's performance is average for Pentium II/366 portables. Ironically, this reflects quite well on the machine as one might expect it to be slower than some of its PE-based siblings. But despite almost bomb-proof build quality it's the £2,925 price that really lets the Armada down.