The HP Pavllion Notebook n5470 comes generously fitted out with the following:
* 256 MB RAM
* 15inch display
* 1 Ghz Athlon memory
* 20 GB hard drive
* DVD/CDRW combo
* 2 Type II or 1 type III card slot
* Built in ethernet and phone jacks
* USB, serial, parallel and PS2 ports

The downside is that the video memory only 8MB, and therefore somewhat sparse. Also, the RAM banks are maxed out, so to upgrade the amount of RAM, you will have to discard one or both of the chips.

I chose this laptop for its price to feature ratio. Machines from other manufacturers that came with the same screen size, processor speed, built-in RAM, and storage options were often several hundred dollars more. Right from unpacking it from its box, it was ready to go.

I decided that I did not want an ultra-light machine, both because of available features, but also because I was afraid of losing, say the floppy drive, if I had to swap it out with the CD-drive. So, everything is built-in, making this machine neither lightweight nor easy to upgrade the DVD/CDRW drive or hard disk. I can deal with that.

The machine is also hot, though not as painfully hot as some laptops I've handled. Unfortunately, the Award BIOS does not allow you to clock down the processor to cool the machine down. You're stuck with a lapwarmer.

The laptop itself is quite comfortable to use. I especially like being able to lock the trackpad--so that if you're typing, you don't end up accidentally placing your cursor all over the place.

When I bought it, I giggled a little bit at the controls on the front. They allow you to play audio CDs in your drive without powering up the whole machine. I've since found it extremely handy. Not using the LCD panel just to play a disc saves considerable battery power, and the panel itself doesn't turn on accidentally. Furthermore,the small display on this part of the laptop can show how much battery power remains.

The built-in speakers are only adequate. Thankfully, with a decent set of headphones, the sound quality improves a great deal. I've also used a cassette adapter plugged into the headphone jack to pipe music from MP3s to my car stereo and to the kitchen boombox.

The CD burner (it's a DVD combo drive) writes at only 4x. This means that a 650MB disk can take as long as 20 minutes to write. However, I'm still very pleased with the performance. I replaced the bundled Roxio CD-Creator with Nero burning ROM. You, however, may like the bundled software. I've gotten into the habit of keeping a "scratchwork" CD-R on me at all times. Nero and the the CD burner can write to multisession disks quite easily--allowing me to transfer large files and continue using on CD-R disc.

Similarly, I replaced the supplied copy of Music Match Jukebox with the freeware MP3 player FreeAmp.

I haven't watched too many DVDs on the machine, other than to experiment. I like having the option. My boyfriend watched a few episodes of the Sopranos on it while I was in the dentists chair, and seemed smug. With more video memory, the DVD picture would be better, but for occassional use, it's nice.

My n5470 came with Windows ME installed; you can also download the files necessary to put Windows 2000 on the machine from the HP web site. I'm actually tempted to downgrade the machine to Windows 98 SE, but that's just me.

This machine also came with the Microsoft Works suite. Users needing Office will have to buy and supply their own copy. It had software for connecting to several dial-up ISPs supplied. I also deleted these files to make space.

I split the 20GB hard disk into two partitions, and, with my boyfriends' help, installed Debian Linux and Xfree86 with KDE. I'm quite pleased with the performance of Linux on this machine. It took some tweaking to get things going, but if you build your own kernel, the n5470 is quite Linux friendly.

In both Windows and in Linux the laptop feels responsive. The only time it seems to hang back is when redrawing screens when I play SimCity 3000 in Linux.

I can get 2.5-3.5 hours out of the battery, depending on how I am using the machine.

I haven't used the phone tech support, but HPs Web site is intuitive and easy to navigate. Drivers, in particular, are easy to find.

In sum, the n5470 offers a lot of convenient features for a very reasonable price. The biggest downer is the video memory, and, as long as you aren't doing a great deal of 3D gaming, its video capabilities are adequate, though not spectacular. I highly recommend this computer for someone who wants a desktop-replacement or do-it-all machine. I do, however, recommend that you consider spending some extra money and research on other software choices.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 2000
Operating System: Windows
Processor: AMD Athlon (K7)
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 15
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20