Compaq Presario CQ5500F Desktop PC – Black - Trusted Online Shopping Store

arrived on time, but just could not start it up, therefore let UPS to return it back.
Rating: 1 / 5

Only comes with DDR2 ram, I really disapprove of false advertising and wish I had saved my money. I thought I had found a good deal, but I guess not. I will be doing my shopping elsewhere from now on, I have never had any trouble with Amazon before but I do not have much money and to see it ruin my plans for a 4gb of DDR3 ram and low profile video game card for a low end gaming setup has cut me so short of money it will be another year before I can save up enough to buy another computer. Overall it is a great computer though, very nice looking on inside, I even tried installing my DDR3 ram I bought and it would not fit in the board. If you don’t care about DDR3 your golden.
Rating: 2 / 5

I purchased this computer as a replacement/upgrade for computer whose power unit fried unepetedly I was amazed at how easy it was to familiarize myself to windows 7 and the software package is decent.
Rating: 4 / 5

I don’t know what Amazon is selling this PC for, but I bought mine at Office Max for [...] (that’s including tax and all) it was marked down [...] dollars off, unopened box.

This thing runs great right out of the box. There is no HP/Compaq recovery CD for restoring the system included, instead they have a separate partition setup on the hard drive containing all of the Windows 7 files and goodies with a utility that can format and reinstall windows whenever you like.

Out of the box, setup is as follows… plug it in, turn it on, after about 5 min Windows 7 is up and running fresh and clean, now go about your business.

The Hardware…

The processor is good enough to work with, although it is the bottom line cheapest CPU on the market at about $30.00 bucks retail value. It can accomplish most tasks at a reasonable speed, but I’d recommend upgrading this sucker if the speed bugs you. The motherboard supports a very large variety of processors from AMD all the way up to the new AMD Phenom II Quad Core processors, if you want the top of the line processor currently on the market it will be about a $130.00 chip you can swap out. I did it, installation was a breeze.

The integrated video card is fairly weak. While its enough to do basic business tasks or view 3d models, you won’t be able to do much gaming with the integrated graphics. The motherboard does support PCI-E X16 graphics cards though. All I had to do was take the PCI-E video card from my old PC and stick it in. Once again, installation was a breeze and I was good to go. If you’re looking for a good gaming graphics card for this PC it will probably run you around another $130.00 (EVGA GeForce GT 240 should do fine (this is a PCI-E 2.0 card, but it will work with this board))

The memory this PC comes with is a good amount for any user (2GB DDR2), I haven’t found the need to upgrade this yet. There is an open slot available though to add additional memory if you wanted to. Another stick of memory could run you about $20-$30 bucks

The only other addition I felt needed to be installed was a wireless network card. $40.00, stuck it in the available PCI slot and I was good to go.

I started with a great PC and over time I’ve found ways to upgrade it to make it better and better. Its very serviceable, its very expandable. I’d recommend this PC to everyone.

Rating: 5 / 5

Good, fast computer for anyone who needs a basic machine to work on. Don’t expect this to be a power gaming machine or anything, but for the price, you get a good processor, ample RAM and HD space, and Windows 7. The Windows 7 license is half the price of the machine anyways, so it works out to be a very good basic system. Have Office 2010 installed, runs without problems. Bought this for a family member and she just needs it for work, email and surfing the web, which is obviously does well. Recommended
Rating: 4 / 5