Compaq Presario CQ50 139WM: US and WM difference

I was first in line for this laptop last saturday. It is a early Christmas present for my wife. Every site ive looked at online says this is a single core proc. Its a dual core!! Vista even says its dual core. I havent installed any graphic intensive games(it is my wifes after all) but this thing flies through every other program. One negative. The dvd burner burns cd’s at a max of 24x

Great for the money. Totally worth it.

Although I dont know if its Dual Core… Just says celeron.

I Installed halo, and played it. It works like a breeze. For $300, I cannot even complain about that. It manages heat effiectively, and has lots of memory to handle my tasks.

Although Vista on this machine – i would not generally recommend. XP, or possibly Linux would allow this machine to release its inner potential, quite possibly.

How did you get it at the sale price if it has not gone on sale yet. Is the price for Black Friday or is that the every day price?

This ws the black friday price. It was set low in order to try to motivate consumers to stop saving and start spending. I believe it worked. Most people that bought this machine, bought 4 machines and sold them on ebay for $450.

I bought this computer with the intention of getting rid of Vista and installing XP
What a mistake!!! It is all but impossible as Microsoft has found a way to shove Vista up our back sides…. DO NOT BUY THIS MACHINE if your intending on loading XP. Do your homework.

Mike,

Format the NTFS or FAT32 Partition that has windows vista on it. – DO NOT FORMAT DRIVE D – (* This contains factory backup partition *)

WindowsXP disk should let you format the partitions. I dont know what kind of problems your experiencing but if your going to give potential customers of this product misleading viewpoints at least provide some facts, like HOW you cannot get rid of vista.

Aric

This looks so cool, and to chris, im pretty sure only the cq50″z” has a dual, but i dont really know, i have yet to open mine.

Vista works fine on this, – you should disable windows defender (* as it is quite aggravating *) to have a program call define as a security attempt, when it can’t even stop background virus services from running.

Either way, I highly recommend this computer to anyone seeking a laptop w/ a budget perspective. You can always upgrade the processor & hard drive in this computer – remember that.

If your looking for an affordable computer – http://www.odpoa.com we can make you an energy efficent computer for under $300 – w/ 2GB memory, 2.0GHZ processor, 80GB Hard drive – why look anywhere else?

i got the cq50-139wm for christmas, i thought it was a bit slow, so i installed xp mce instead, seems to be a lot faster now. for those of you who would like to downgrade to xp, you will need to download nlite http://www.nliteos.com, and the xp drivers package with instructions http://rs422.rapidshare.com/files/162621776/CQ50_139WM_XP_Drivers.zip
make a nlite disk of your xp install disk and slipstream the drivers in and you are good to go.

I got this laptop for my daughter for Christmas. She absolutely loves it and has had no problem with it. I think it’s a great starter laptop for a teen. Especially at the $300 price, and I beleive we got it just after Thanksgiving a sort of pre black friday sale. I highly recommend it, as long as you remember you get what you pay for.

Good morning, I have at big problem my laptop presario cq50-139wm, I proced to format all complete, but when I try to install windows XP, I can’t, Please help me or give any tips to install windows xp.

thanks.
I will apreciate your help.

how do u if its a duo core i got mine in walmart on black friday for $300 are u sure it a duo core it just says celeron

has any one had problems with it heating up and cutting off while using it??

Lindsey,

I have not experienced that issue. However, it seems your fans are possibly dead and the processor is not being cooles properly forcing a shutdown to prevent it from melting.

Everyone, I have to change my review I originally wrote.

This computer… Well, you get what you pay for. In this case, 6 months after using it, It crashes every time I try to use it, and has green lines going across the screen.

I called up HP support, gave them the model name – “compaq” and told them my issue. They immediatley said, “Oh, I believe you have an compaq CQ-50″…

I strongly recommend that if you experience any sort of problems what-so-ever, please without hesisitation send it back to HP. I was lucky to have my 1 year warranty still active, I just called HP yesterday to send it back.

Just wanted to let people know that the person who claims that this model is a dual core is INCORRECT. It’s a single core celeron running at 2 gigaherz. If you are wondering which person to trust, I bought 3 of the exact model and am an electronic engineer and pc tech.

never delcared this was a dual core model. Some have speculated that a dual-core cpu was in their model the day of black-friday, don’t know where they were shipped to.

Be warned my graphics card went dead on this laptop 3 months after buying it. Green lines went across the screen, sent it into HP for a fix, got it back, 2 weeks later – went dead again. It seems HP wanted to get rid of it’s outdated stock parts in this computer.. be warned.

Also, can’t install XP on this laptop. Tried for about 6 hours. Turns out, HP didn’t include the proper XP drivers (* In collaboration with microsoft *) to promote vista

i have the cq50-139wm and it hasn't given me any problems at all so i don't see what everybody is talking about. well anyways good luck.

Process still opaque, here. This seems a long way from the "normal" installation of a XP. I gather putting Linux on cq50-139wm would also be a problem? I see that there are drivers for Win 7 but me thinks it is more resource hungry the 3gb limit cq50-139wm has.

thanks for presenting a possible route w/ enough hints and the meaty links to boot.