Full Review

The Compaq Presario CQ40 is another budget laptop contender vying for your money. It's a petite 14-inch laptop, breaking the monotone of 15-inch notebooks in the Top 5. It has a black screen lid with a characteristic Q fashioned across its face. The innards are two-toned, with the black pronounced on the bezel and keyboard, but the palmrest and touchpad are washed with silver. It is a no-nonsense laptop, and looks the part as well.

It has a standard hardware configuration: a Core 2 Duo T6400 2-GHz processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, 250GB hard drive, along with three USB ports, onboard Altec Lansing speakers, a DVD writer, and an HDMI port. It also lacks Gigabit Ethernet and Draft-N Wi-Fi, a trend synonymous with all the budget laptops except the winner, the Acer Aspire 5738. Its 14-inch screen supports a maximum screen resolution of 1280x800 pixels, and it comes with a 1.3MP webcam grooved at the center of its top screen bezel.

The keyboard is one of the best of the lot, and it has a responsive touchpad as well. What's more, there's a small button placed between the touchpad and the keyboard that lets you switch off the touchpad for uninterrupted writing—a nifty feature that. There's also a Wi-Fi toggle switch placed next to the power on button, above the keyboard.

Performance isn't much different from the rest, as the Compaq Presario CQ40 has hardware similar to others. A WorldBench score of 82 and a battery life of just under 3 hours from the CQ40 is admirable, and its onboard speakers are pretty good by laptop standards. It is also the lightest laptop in the comparison, weighing just a paltry 2.2-kg. If you want a 14-inch budget laptop with good performance and at the right price, the Compaq Presario CQ40 is definitely worth a shot.

Bottom Line

The most petite 14-inch contender, the Compaq Presario CQ40 has one of the best keyboards in the lineup, and has all the requisite features you would expect from a budget laptop that is priced at Rs. 36,500.