Labs

The Compaq 6820s has a numeric keypad which can speed up data entry in spreadsheets. The keyboard has responsive keys and is very comfortable to use. The touch pad is small but accurate, but the buttons lack feedback when pressed. The three USB2 ports are underneath the ExpressCard/54 slot, so are hard to access if you have a bulky ExpressCard plugged in.

The laptop's screen has a matt finish, so is more suitable for use in bright lighting than a reflective display. It's

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not very bright and white areas look greyish. The 17in screen's 1,440x900 resolution leaves plenty of room for large documents. There was some banding in our greyscale transition test, but our colour gradient test was reproduced smoothly.

Performance

This was the slowest laptop with an Intel processor in our application benchmarks, although it wasn't far behind Samsung's R70 in our video- and image-editing tests. It has only 1GB of RAM, so didn't do well in our memory-intensive image-editing and multitasking tests.

The laptop has an ATI Radeon X1350 graphics chipset, from ATI's previous graphics generation. It didn't fare well in our demanding 3D gaming test and managed less than 10fps in our Call of Duty 2 benchmark. This is the lowest score for a laptop with a dedicated graphics chipset here.

We were more impressed with its lengthy battery life of three hours and 48 minutes, just a few minutes behind the front-runners in our light usage test. The laptop also has one of the larger hard disks in the group, at 160GB.