Zip through your daily processes
Written: Nov 16 '02
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Pros: Blazingly fast, Huge screen, crisp keyboard, decent battery life, CDRW DVD drive.
Cons: Sub-par 3D performance, somewhat large, on the heavy side
The Bottom Line: Fast, good looking, and useful, this laptop is everything you need for school, work, or even play.
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| eric1285's Full Review: HP Pavilion Athlon4 1GHz / 30GB / 256MB / 15" TFT ... |
I recently bought this laptop for school and have found it to be nearly perfect. I carry it to and from school every day, and it does everything I need it to do, plus more. Its strong points are its incredible speed, roomy hard drive, beautiful screen, good battery life, nice keyboard, and several others that I'll hopefully remember to mention.
The Athlon 1 Ghz processor that this machine comes with has yet to disappoint. It runs all my productivity programs seamlessly, as well as playing most games without trouble. It easily outpaces most 1 Ghz P3 processors out there. The 256 mb or RAM that comes with it means that you can open all your applications at once, and the computer will still run fine. The fast processor, combined with Windows XP Home makes it rock solid in stability and faster than almost any other laptop your friends may own.
A 30 GB hard drive is plenty for me. I've installed many programs, including disk space eating games, as well as saved movies, music, videos, and all sorts of multimedia on my laptop. The hard drive is roomy, and fast enough to carry on any processes without any noticeable chugging.
One of the main reasons I was compelled to purchase this computer was its beautiful screen. It's big, bright, and has a resolution of 1024x768. It also comes with a handy TV-Out plug, which means you can use your television as a monitor. The screen displays text crisply, and if you have poor vision, you can even use Microsoft's ClearType function to emphasize the text. Colors are amazing, and watching DVD's is just plain eye-candy.
The Athlon 4 processor comes with AMD's PowerNow drivers, which allow you to clock down the processor when you aren't running processor intensive tasks in order to save battery life. This really does have a huge impact on battery life. Without it, I can get perhaps 150-160 minutes of computer time. When turned on, I can get almost 4 hours! The program can clock your computer all the way down to 210 MHz. When it's on, you rarely notice the slowdown, since it fluctuates the processor speed automatically to make sure you can still run your programs smoothly. As another power saving option, you can dim your screen all the way down to stretch your battery. 4 hour battery life is great when your on a cross country flight of about 5 hours.
A big issue in laptops is their keyboards. Most laptops come with either stiff, cramped keyboards, or buttons that are too loose to the touch. The Pavilion n5475's keyboard is crisp, and well spaced out. There is plenty of room for long typing, and never once have I felt cramps or soreness after typing even the long papers I have for school. It's responsive, and the keys are sufficiently springy.
One of the most useful tools the laptop comes with is the CDRW DVD drive. It is incredibly useful to be able to write your own cd's on the go. If a friend wants a song on your computer, you can make a cd for him. If you don't have a floppy and you need to save a file in portable media, make a cd. It's useful for storage, and making backups of important software. It's also faster than the advertised 4x. It performs more like a 8x drive, burning full CD's in 10 minutes or less. It also allows you to watch DVD's anywhere on its beautiful screen.
A subtle, but nonetheless useful feature, is the CD control panel on the front of the case. It allows you to play CD's without turning on the computer, which saves battery life and is a nifty feature.
Although I've given the laptop nothing but praise, it does have its pitfalls. It is on the heavy side. 7 pounds is a noticeable weight to tote around, but it is not horrible. It's also somewhat large. Fitting it into my Targus case along with my mouse and AC adapter is a little bit of a squeeze, but it's not an inconvenience. It's case is large, but it looks very nice. The laptop also gets very hot, but not so hot that it's going to melt anything inside or burn out.
The biggest downfall is the poor 3D performance. Unless you are a hardcore gamer, it won't be a big deal. I play plenty of first person shooters that are graphic intensive, and they run at a steady 30fps or greater. Unless you're used to 60 fps, you won't even feel that there is something wrong.
Overall, this laptop is a dream come true. It's fast, good looking, and does everything you could ask for it. I highly recommend it, as well as HP. It's a wonderful machine.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1420
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): 21-30
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Epinions.com ID:
eric1285
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Reviews written: 5
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