Compaq Presario CQ60-615DX Notebook PC

The CQ60-615DX is a very serviceable laptop at a rock bottom price.

I love doing my personal shopper thing, it’s one of my favorite parts of being the family’s go to guy in the technology department. It gives me the opportunity to test drive a lot of different devices and it’s certainly got it all over spending the weekend at their house cleaning viruses off of their machine. Plus, when I do the initial setup on a device it makes the inevitable future cleanup and recovery go a little easier…

The CQ60-615DX is the perfect machine for someone who only uses their PC for mail, word processing and surfing. It has a 15.6” screen, an almost full sized keyboard (with numeric keypad) and pretty impressive sound for a laptop in this price range ($349). It’s powered by a Celeron processor (2.2 GHz), has 2GB of RAM (upgradeable to 4), a 250GB hard drive, wireless b/g/n, 8X CD/DVD±R/RW drive and runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. The only thing it lacks is a media card reader, but standalone readers are a dime a dozen these days, and at this price you can definitely afford one.

Having a decent sized hard drive for storing your pics, a DVD player/burner for sharing/archiving said pics, and a keyboard that’s actually usable make this system a much better alternative then a comparably priced Netbook for those non-power users in your life.