I intentionally wanted a PC with both a DVD player and CD-RW. And some of Hewlett Packard's models offered this combo with a decent processor, hard drive space, memory, etc. Being a cheapskate, I purchased the Pavilion through ubid.com as I got a great deal (only $750 including "next-day" shipping so that it arrived in 4 days! To be fair, the auction was won on a Saturday and the PC showed up Tuesday morning). I'm quite pleased with the deal as pcmall.com had two models down from this one (8755c) for around the same price!

Likes:
. Writable CD and DVD player! Now I can weather the storm until recordable DVD becomes reasonably priced!

. Price - I got a great price by being patient at ubid.com! Having Easter coincide with the auction helped limit the number of bidders as well (in my opinion).

. SDRAM - I can add more memory without breaking the bank (128 Meg is about $40 and 256 Meg is about $80). Also, it has 3 slots total for DIMMs! So, for $160 I can add half a gig to round out to 640 Meg of memory! That should be enough to allow Millennium Edition to do a lot of leaking before it hurts me! Also, remember when 640 kilobytes of memory was a decked out machine? :)

. 3D video card. True it isn't state of the art, but good enough to help me catch up on my backlog of games! It is a Nvidia TNT 2 Vanta with 16 Megs of RAM.

Dislikes:
. To add internal hardware, you have to take it apart. Yes, the outer side plastic comes off easy, but to get to the motherboard, you have to slide out the mechanical structure holding the drives. Looks painful enough from the pictures, I may wait until I have all the parts I want to add first!

. Warranty - I'm a tad worried about the warranty, what will get covered if there are issues, etc. It is a refurbished machine bought through ubid.com auction. Ubid will say "deal with HP" if there are any hiccups.

. A little noisier than I would like. But shuts down appropriately when the adjustable time-out period is set. Looks like they incorporated "save to disk" feature that most laptops have had for over six years.

. A stylish, but "in the way" door over the DVD and optional bay. Probably no big deal since a DVD movie will last a couple of hours. If it gets to be too much of a pain, I will remove it.

. Only one free drive bay. But it is the normal height 5.25" variety.

The Pavilion comes with the following:
. Nice keyboard with good-sized palmrest and lots of 'extra' programmable keys.

. Decent two-button scroll mouse

. Moderate un-powered speakers. These don't have enough punch even though they are from Polk Audio. My guess is the sound card's audio drive capability isn't that great.

. Too much software to mention! Most of which you probably won't want anyway! The more important ones are Win ME, MS Works 2000, Quicken Basic 2000, MS Money 2000, MusicMatch Jukebox 5.1, Adaptec DirectCD & Easy CD Creator, & WinDVD 2000. A nice feature is a 3-CD system recovery set!

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 750
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50