The Presario 1800 comes with a Quick Start guide, a Lithium Ion battery, an AC adapter and a Quick Restore CD, which can come in handy in case your computer's OS goes bad on you. The user's manual comes on a CD, which is my first, if minor, complaint with this product. I am not a fan of placing the only copy of a user's manual on a CD, since how is the user going to be able to read what's on the CD if they run into problem setting up the product in the first place? This is not a big deal for most users, but for users who do not have a second computer handy with a CD-ROM drive ready, it could become a big hassle.

The actual Presario 1800 laptop is one of the most attractive ones that I've seen yet, with its stylish grey-silver top and its many curves. It does seem to be a little too thick for something that one would carry around all the time, but for a desktop replacement laptop, this thickness is about average. Weight wise, the Presario 1800, at about 7.9 lbs., is pretty heavy to carry around all the time--but again, it is quite average, even a little on the light side, for a desktop replacement laptop.

The front of the laptop boasts is a status display LCD that can be semi-seen when the laptop is closed. This status display is one of the many little unique features that Compaq has built into the Presario 1800--and it is really useful too! It will show you the battery level, whether the laptop is turned on or not (or in sleep mode) and also the track number and disc time of the CD that you are playing when you are using Compaq's DisqPlay2 feature, which I will explain later. There are also standard CD audio buttons such as Play/Pause and Next/Previous Track for use with DiscPlay2 as well as very handy controls for volume. All these features without even having to open up the laptop!

The left side of the Presario 1800.

The left side houses the floppy disk drive as well as the built-in 8X DVD-ROM drive. I would have preferred to have the DVD-ROM drive be removable, much like with the Presario 1700, so that users can interchange it with other drives such as a CD-RW drive, but this cannot be done on the Presario 1800. The right side carries the battery compartment, jacks for an external headphone and microphone as well as the telephone and network jacks for the built-in modem and 10/100 LAN. I would have, however, favored an extra Line-out jack for plugging the laptop into a separate speaker system since headphone jacks are not specifically designed for that purpose and may output some unnecessary noise. There is also a PC Card slot that supports virtually any type of PC Card or 32-bit Cardbus device you throw at it.

The right side of the Presario 1800.

Finally, the rear end of the Presario 1800.

The rear of the laptop is where all the rest of the I/O jacks are located. There is one shared PS/2 plug for either a mouse or keyboard, the power plug, a parallel port, a plug for the optional docking port, a Video-OUT jack for plugging the laptop to a TV, a D-SUB analog connector to use an external monitor, a serial port for plugging in a mouse and a USB port. It would have been nice for Compaq to include two separate PS/2 ports to facilitate for both a PS/2 keyboard and a PS/2 mouse to be used at the same time, though. The serial port that is present can resolve this dilemma if one has a serial mouse, but, if you're anything like me, you've probably given up on serial a long time ago. Also present at the rear of the Presario 1800 is a tiny intake fan, which hardly makes any noise at all, and is automatically turned on and off depending on the internal temperature of the laptop.

Finally, on the bottom of the Presario 1800, there is a hatch that can be unscrewed to facilitate for future memory upgrades. This makes it very easy to upgrade memory.

On the inside, the Presario 1800 looks much like any other laptop except for a few Compaq-extras. The keyboard is pretty standard when it comes to a laptop and is reasonably comfortable when typing. The Presario 1800, like all other Compaq laptops, comes with a touch pad, which is my personal preference (over the touch "points"). Two purple-colored buttons labeled with an up and down arrow are made for easy scrolling, which I thought was a very nice touch. The above-mentioned Compaq-extras are a row of buttons along the top of the keyboard for easy access to commonly-used functions and programs such as Internet browsing, email checking, music, etc. I have yet to find a way to configure these buttons to my own custom functions, though.

Finally, one can never miss the huge 15" TFT LCD monitor that the Presario 1800 includes. Spanning almost from edge to edge, it is one of the largest screens that you'll find on any laptop. The 15" LCD runs at a recommended resolution of 1024x768 and should make looking at the laptop just as if you're was using a desktop.

On to: Powering Up