Compaq sr1150nx Review

Overall Rating

Good value, when i bought it.
It looks so COOL!
Plenty, and I mean plenty of usb ports.
A memory card bay for five different types of cards
Graphics card bay is designed well

Baaaaad cooling and ventilation.
The design of the case is prone to collecting dust, fast.
Now, the value is terrible (but expected, of course)
Too much plastic where the expansion bays are.
Cheap components
Spyware, everywhere!

I bought this system some 3 years ago and it worked well enough. but the cooling, ugh it was awful. The processor would climb to the 70's (celcius) and the ventilation was poor. The heatsink was of a poor grade and mounted to the processor with a heatpad. The fan was improperly mounted, with four screws forced between the fins and there was only one intake and one outake, which were both small. The motherboard is a via, with a via chipset it does look great, but i doubt the quality of it. The build quality on the outside however is wonderful, the front plastic plate is glossy and smooth and there are flaps that open and close with the cd drives, which is cool. The power button is big and lit by a green led under the button which illuminates a green bar, very cool. After i made two holes in the case and attached two 120mm fans all the ports began to spit dust. This was my fault for installing such huge, noisy fans but it is probably not normal to see globs of dust falling from your usb and firewire ports. Having an air compressor, i blow out the dust every month, so it really is no big deal, but with time, i'm sure it would accumulate huge quantities of dust, even with the stock fans. My friend's computers arent this bad for dust. The hardware, at the time, was good a 3200+xp processor and 512 of ram; I later added a bfg geforce 6200 as you can see, modding the case is easy, the metal is thin and can be hacked away to make room for things like a glass window or vents, etc. the front chunk is composed entirely of plastic. When you insert a new hard drive, or floppy disk drive, plastic tabs click the drive into place and the drives it comes with cannot be easily removed without taking out the motherboard. Instead, you have to leave them there and mount new drives underneath. There is only room for one expansion, fortunately you can just snap out the plastic expansion bay plate without putting anything in. This helps greatly with ventilation. One last bug, which is standard on microsoft rubbish is the spyware. Compaq's "organize" is a useless application which serves to block out 40% of the screen with jumping flowers and advertisements, free internet offers gnaw at your patience and their process cannot be closed. Instead, you have to go along with it and get rid of all of it afterwards. Compaq has added more spyware IN ADDITION to the rubbish microsoft has already planted on the disk. beginners to computing will be swamped, with no way out although advanced users will lose their patience and destroy tokyo trying to get rid of the spyware. Simply ridiculous. Another thing is when a minor virus hits, the restore points add allllll of that rubbish back in so you have to destroy it (and tokyo) again. i dont recall making a restore point with spyware in it. This is useless. So, with a graphics card, this computer is competant but go and buy another model! Time has passed and computers have better hardware for the same money.