Stuart -
The armadas include more stuff for expansion in a corporate environment, better docking options, and a few other features that corporate buyers like. As far as quality of construction, I'm not sure there is a big difference. I have heard the 'pay more, presarios are built cheap' arguments a number of times both from salespeople and from some people within CPQ, but I can find nothing to support this. Presarios are built with a higher level of integration, less modularity, more base features and fewer options than the corporate products. That's appropriate for the consumer market. They typically come with more 'included software'. They don't always use Intel processors. But aside from that, I have no reason to think that they are any more likely to fail than the armada products.
I should qualify this by saying that I have never owned either a presario or an armada laptop. Many years ago I bought a Compaq LTE elite laptop. It uses a 75 MHz 486, trackball for pointing, and has an integrated power supply (just a power cord, no external box). It is now almost 5 years old and still works fine, my daughter uses it for taking notes and such at college. It upgraded to Win95 no problem. It has been dropped, soaked, abused in every way that one could imagine, and it just keeps ticking.
My current laptop is a DEC HiNote 2000 which I have had for almost a year. It is a high end laptop with NIC, 56K modem, 14.3" 1024 graphics, big disk and big memory, still thin and easy to carry. I love it. I believe that this product has been relabeled and is sold as the Armada 6500. |
