Bad Thrift Store Finds: A Compaq Presario CQ61 with a Single Core CPU
Boredom + thrift store perusing = crappy laptop purchases.
A laptop with an “as-is” label doesn’t usually scare me. A laptop with an AMD sticker on it usually interests me. Unfortunately for me, this Walmart special Compaq Presario CQ61 has a bad LCD with a burnt-out backlight and a circle of dead pixels. Combine that with a single-core AMD Sempron M120 and you start to wonder why I even bothered to salvage this $12 laptop.
Still, I have to give this laptop some credit; it acquitted itself in FlatOut 2 better than I had expected it to and it could play 480p YouTube videos - after installing an adblocker and h264ify, of course. It’s hardly the most powerful thing you could’ve bought in 2009, but one thing’s for sure: AMD’s purchase of ATI salvaged an otherwise thoroughly “meh” laptop. Except for the speakers, those are alright.
By the way, the aforementioned Phenom II X2 processor was the N660, the fastest dual-core AMD processor that you could find in a normal laptop at the time. That being said, they aren’t that common and the Toshiba laptop it came in is hard to find with that Phenom.
