Compaq Armada 7800

The wait for Pentium II notebooks is finally over. Issues surrounding power consumption and waste heat production, cited as part of the reason for the delay, have been overcome and the first products are here. Processor issues aside, the first thing you'll notice about the Armada is its weight - 4kg if you have the CD-ROM drive installed, and 3.9kg with the floppy fitted. This is heavy for a portable, although the fact that the power supply is integrated accounts for some of the extra mass.

Although the review sample is a late prototype, the build quality and durability are up to Compaq's usual high standards, which bodes well for the finished product. The case felt as though it could take a bit of punishment, which probably also contributed to the weight of the machine.

A docking station connector is provided for using the Armada as a desktop replacement, while more ad-hoc links to desktop peripherals are catered for by a PS/2 mouse or keyboard port, a 4Mbits/sec infrared serial interface and a USB port, as well as the standard PC connections. The machine can be expanded using its two Type II PC Card slots, which can accept a Type III if required, and it already has an integral 33Kbits/sec modem which is Flash-upgradable to 56Kbits/sec via the K56Flex route.

Efforts have clearly been made to keep the innards cool, with air intake slots above the keyboard and a fan at the rear left. The casing above this area got fairly warm, but didn't feel alarmingly hot even after several hours of mains use with power management disabled.

One aspect of the Armada's design I've never liked is that unlike almost every other notebook on the market it lacks a real palmrest. There's just enough room between the spacebar and the front edge of the case for the mouse buttons, but this doesn't really constitute much in the way of palm support. There are tilt feet at the back of the case, but they didn't do much to improve the situation. Another consequence of the lack of a palmrest is that it more or less forces the designers to use a trackpoint for pointer control, rather than the arguably more usable trackpad option.

Compaq's notebook keyboard has hardly changed over the years - I have an ancient 486SX/25 portable with a nearly identical one. Luckily, this is no bad thing. The layout is spacious, and although the action has got rather lighter and flimsier over the years, it's still quite pleasant in use. The standard key set is extended by four programmable buttons above the main pad, which can be set up to give shortcuts to your major apps.

Sound is processed by an ESS ES1878 AudioDrive chip and sent to a pair of speakers built into the screen hinges. These are fairly loud and don't break up at high volume, but they lack bass and tend to get unpleasantly harsh when cranked up.

XGA TFT screens are pretty much de rigueur for high-end notebooks these days, and the Armada follows the trend with its 13.3in panel. This can handle the full 16.7 million simultaneous colours in 1,024 x 768 resolution, and is large enough to be comfortably readable. However, it was noticeably under-lit, leaving the display gloomy even in soft lighting. Compaq should really sort this out before mainstream production gets under way.

As usual, the Armada's power management controls are contained in the much-expanded dialog accessed via the Power icon in Control Panel. This makes it easy to choose between the various preset levels of saving or configuring your own and is preferable to fiddling about in the Bios setup itself. The lithium ion battery should last for about two and a half hours with power management enabled.