The right ultra-portable at the right price.
Written: Mar 19 '03
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Quality of Tech Support: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Small, lightweight, fast, powerful notebook. 2 USB ports.
Cons: No PS/2 port, only 1 PC Card slot on notebook itself, clunky base station.
The Bottom Line: A great ultraportable - powerful, cheap, light + portable, expandable. And so cool looking. I love this little guy.
|
|
|
| jskaczmarek's Full Review: HP Pavillion XU155 PIII 750MHz / 30GB / 256MB / Wi... |
I bought the xu155 used off of Half.com and have not regretted the purchase once. The computer is small and lightweight, easy to take anywhere, and has a very small footprint. It is slick looking, and has lots of useful ports on the notebook itself. The expansion base/docking station has lots of expandability. A great notebook if you can get it used and cheap.
Pros:
- Small (less than an inch border around the 12.1" screen), lightweight (less than 3.5 pounds) and very slick (silver/black).
- Notebook proper has most of the ports you need (modem, LAN 10/100, VGA video, sound in/out, 2 USB, 1 Type II PC Card Slot). There are external volume controls.
- Big hard drive, reasonably expandable RAM (maxes out at 512 MB RAM), and quite fast processor (750 MHz PIII). Great for almost anything, audio/office/graphics although you would probably want an external monitor for graphics work.
- 12.1" screen is quite readable at 1024x768 w/ large fonts on. LCD is reasonably bright, although I have seen better.
- Battery life is good. Power button is kind of clumsy but no big deal.
- Works well w/ wireless internet (I have a 3co card).
- Docking station accepts lot of extras (2 PC Cards, 2 optical Drives, lots of extra ports).
Cons:
- docking station is a bit large and clunky for an ultraportable. Has unnecessary features like an LCD clock.
- Would be nice if the notebook proper had a few more ports (like PS/2, Firewire) and an extra PC Card SLot. But the 2 USB ports are good for most applications.
- BIOS Setup is not obviously accessible. To get to it, you have to shut down and then turn the machine back on while holding down the F1 key.
- External USB floppy drive. I recommend getting it though as this is the only way to install BIOS updates.
- HP's legendary crummy tech support. But being a tech myself this doesn't bother me at all. They are reasonably easy to bully into agreeing that one of you parts is broken and they need to send a new one free of charge :)
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 850
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 701-800
Screen Size: 12 inches
RAM: 128
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
jskaczmarek
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.