OOOH Baby, you're on DVD
Written: Jun 04 '04 (Updated Jun 04 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Front Panel Access and Layout, Speed, DVD Burner
Cons: Damn "POWER ON" Light
The Bottom Line: I love it, I recommend it!
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| joetrent's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Compaq Presario SR1000 (DW256A#ABA... |
I am saddened to report that we have experienced a significant death in our family. The blow was tempered somewhat by the advance warnings that we had. Our beloved COMPAQ Presario 5005US - 999 MHz computer started giving us the dreaded diagnoses of an imminent hard drive failure. She had had this same condition about a year ago, and I performed a brain transplant (new hard drive) to keep her limping along a little longer. Alas, her tired, weak, and elderly muscles (999 MHz processor) could no longer keep up with the Olympian pace I desired. It was time to let her go with some sense of dignity intact.
Somewhat cold heartedly, I went to a computer adoption agency (Office Max) to look for a replacement before the final death rattle. (My wife said I could.) I was looking for a much more muscular “son” machine to replace her. Since retiring, my computing interests have changed from databases, spreadsheets, business plans, and presentations to digital photo manipulations, and authoring digital video stuff of the grandkids. I wanted “bells and whistles” without selling my wife, kids, and grandkids to get them. The old girl would have had to go anyway. (I’m also not really sad.)
Anyway, I found him sitting on the shelf with a great big green smile. (More on that later.) He is the COMPAQ Presario SR1030NX. He appeared to have all the stuff I was looking for with a very reasonable adoption fee. He came home with us for only $639. (That was $689 with a $50 mail-in rebate.) After carefully getting him home and set up, I can say unequivocally that I love our new “boy”. He has all the multi media accoutrements that I wanted, and he really hauls….yes he does.
OK, enough with the computer “personality” twaddle. As my queen says, I’m old and immature, not childish. This box has exceeded all my expectations to do my photo and video stuff without breaking the bank. For the aforementioned $639 I got the PC, keyboard, and a “ball” type mouse. I don’t use the included mouse. I like my IBM optical much better. No monitor or speakers are included, but my old ones are just fine. This thing is set up really well for a multimedia machine. It’s a fast processing machine with a Combo CD/DVD+R/+RW writer and a bunch of front connections for more stuff than I have. Now, on with the techno babble. Hopefully more “babble” than “techno” since I’ll describe mostly what it has on it, and why I like or don’t like something.
Before I go on, here’s a list of the hardware included so you don’t have to read further if you don’t want to.
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Processor at 2.1 GHz.
512 MB DDR SDRAM.
160 GB 7200 rpm hard drive.
48x CD-ROM drive.
HP 400i DVD+R/+RW and CD writer.
3.5 floppy drive.
9 in 1 memory card reader for stuff like compact flash, memory sticks, etc.
7 USB 2.0 slots (4 on the back, 3 on the front).
2 Firewire 1394 slots (one back, one front).
Integrated video VIA KM400 chipset with S3 UniChrome graphics.
AGP slot to upgrade graphics for 3D gaming.
Integrated sound with jacks for line out, microphone, and headphone on both the back and the front.
10/100 MB Network Interface Card.
56k modem.
Parallel, Serial, and Monitor port.
This machine uses an Athlon XP 3000+ 2.1 GHz processor. This is supposed to be AMD’s answer to the Pentium 4- 3GHz processor. I guess GHz numbers don’t mean much. Benchmarks show they are really close. It comes with 512 MB of PC2700 DDR SDRAM. The RAM bank has two slots. The 512 of included onboard memory only takes up one of them, so upgrading can be done without throwing away what you already have. That’s a good thing. Like I alluded to before, this thing hauls butt.
The graphics and audio are integrated on the mother board. This is common for this level of machine. The graphics are great as is for me, but a couple of technical reviews indicate it just doesn’t cut it for 3D gaming. Fortunately, this Presario has an empty AGP slot to update the graphics. Three empty PCI slots would let you put in your SoundBlaster 2,000,000 to just go nuts.
It comes with Windows XP home edition and a whole bunch of other stuff preloaded. The three I use the most are the CD data and music burning software, the DVD authoring software, and the 60 day free trial set of Microsoft Office 2003 apps. (More on these later.) Most of the rest is either advertising trial versions, or COMPAQ organizing crap I never use. I do wish companies would stop doing that. It just wastes my time editing the Startup and MSCONFIG to clear the bloat. I’m lazy.
One strange thing about this machine is that it does not come with any program recovery disks. Instead, it has an application to create recovery CD’s or DVD’s. It creates these to recover the machine to the configuration it was in when it came out of the box. Oh yeah, you have to buy the recordable media to do this. What’s up with that!
The box is a mid size tower in dark gray with a light gray trim. The whole side panel slides off by removing one thumbscrew. The front is flat with black plastic covering most of the components on the front. I like this, since it makes cleaning the front really easy without fooling around with nooks and crannies. This is important to me, since the machines in the family room so I can watch TV while “working”. And more importantly, my Queen does not consider cleaning a computer “women’s” work. (Since she won’t read this, she doesn’t think much else is “women’s” work either. She says they’re all my jobs. God love her, I do.)
Now on to the previously mentioned “green smile”. The “power on” light on this box is big, green, and bright. To me it was annoying to look at across the room. I only thought that it was annoying until the machine went into sleep mode. The damn thing flashes. I bit her highnesses steel crochet needle in two, and got my electrical tape to cover it up. Problem fixed, and I’m smiling. I would guess this is more an old man issue than a real problem.
This machine comes with a PS2 connected, gray and black, keyboard that I really like. It has medium pressure “soft” keys that are really comfortable to use. The key layout is standard for Windows style keyboards. Ten-key pad, cursor keys, upper function keys, blah, blah, blah. Across the very top are programmable keys for common tasks. I’ve had these on keyboards before, but never used them. I do on this machine. Setting them up is a breeze, and there is only 10 clearly labeled keys to fool with. One puts the machine to sleep, one for help, a popup calculator (really, really handy), two volume controls, and a sound “mute” button. The last four are Internet speed keys. “Connect” to call up your ISP program, “Search” to pull up your favorite search web site, “Email” to launch your email application, and “Club Q” to go to a COMPAQ web site. I reprogrammed this one to go to a favorite web site. It did take me a little while to get used to the black keys with white lettering, but it’s going to really hide my grubby finger marks.
Setup was a snap. I plugged in my monitor, my HP 970cse printer, my USB HP scanner, my DSL modem, and my IBM optical mouse. After powering up the box, XP setup screens came up to configure the machine. It recognized every component by name and model number, installed the drivers, and even installed the special programs that originally came with my peripherals. How the hell did it do that? It recognized my DSL modem, asked me my ISP name, and asked for my userID and password. I was connected!!! I’ve since loaded my ISP software, but that was impressive. The whole thing took about 5 minutes. I don’t know whether to credit Microsoft for a really good version of XP, or HP/COMPAQ for loading a whole bunch of libraries. Oh well, thank you somebody.
The 160 GB Ultra DMA hard drive is plenty fast at 7200 rpm. It’s also very quiet. I hope it stays that way. I can’t imagine ever filling it up, but I’ve been saying that since I got my first 10 MB hard drive.
Of the many things I like about this machine beside the monumental speed increase, my favorite is the front panel access for the connections. I know I’ve aged prematurely over the years crawling around on the floor plugging and unplugging peripherals from the backs of computers. NO MORE!!!! This thing comes with 7 USB 2.0 slots. Three are on the front, and they are not hidden behind some damn plastic door. It also has two 1394 Firewire ports for digital video cameras and such. One is on the back and one is on the front. Again, no little door. It has three audio jacks on the front. These are the audio in, microphone, and headset. The audio out, another audio in and microphone are on the back. I use a Dazzle to transfer VCR tapes for editing. These front end connections, and Firewire, make a huge difference in my procrastinating before having some fun.
A 9 in 1 memory card reader is also located on the front. This directly handles stuff like digital camera memory cards. Just take the memory out of the camera, plug it into the appropriate slot, and it treats it just like a hard drive. You can open files, rename them, move them, etc. This is really handy and saves camera batteries while unloading pictures. Besides one of the USB slots, it supports the following memory:
Compact Flash I/II
Memory Stick/ Memory Stick Pro
Smartmedia/xD
MMC/SD
The machine comes with a separate 48x CD reader. This is really handy when copying a CD to the burner, or using to play music and loading data. It saves wear and tear on the much more expensive CD/DVD writer.
My other favorite thing on this machine is the HP 400i combination CD and DVD+R/+RW writer. I’ve never had a DVD burner before. 4.7 gigs is a whole bunch of grandkid movies. Look out family, prepare to be bored.
The burner writes CD’s at 24x for CD/R and 10x for CD/RW. Its DVD writing speed is 8x for DVD+R and 4x for DVD+RW. It has performed flawlessly. I format and burn CD’s about 5 times faster than the old machine did. It’s a single format burner meaning it only records DVDs in the DVD+ format. I ain’t got no opinion on the format argument about which is best. All I know is our Panasonic 5-disc DVD player says it will only play the DVD- format. That being said by them, it has played every DVD+ disk I have authored without a problem. Go figure, and lucky, lucky me. They play just fine on the kids Sony also.
One choke I’ve learned since having this machine is the cost of DVD recordable media. It is a whole bunch more expensive that CD’s. 4x is about $1.50 to $2.50 a disc. 8x is a bunch more. Forgive me if I don’t calculate the price/megabyte here. All I know is a DVD is equal to a happy hour to a regular hour beer at the American Legion. After buying 50 DVD’s, Grandpa needs a beer!
The SR1030NX comes with two burner software packages. The first I use is RecordNow! I use this for music and data CD’s. It works as well as Adaptec EasyCD Creator did on the old, dead machine. If you’ve used any CD burning software, this one’s a no brainer.
For burning video CD’s and DVD’s the included software is InterVideo WinDVD Creator. This is a basic editing and authoring package. In my opinion, it doesn’t cut it for real editing. Because I’m cheap, I use VideoWave4 and Ulead VideoStudio for that. They run great on this machine. Really fast editing and rendering. WinDVD is great for creating the final DVD if you’re not a pro. It’s extremely easy to use. Just import the video clips, connect them with some cool transitions, add some titles and music, and then author the menus. The basic menu has a chapter’s button and a play button. You can do some basic customizing with these. A preview mode lets you play with a remote control simulator to see what you’ve done. After being satisfied with your Spielberg artistic efforts, the final burn can be done. I really like the fact that this software will reformat and burn files for DVDs and, VCD and SVCD formats. I’ll probably go higher end eventually, but I can bore a whole bunch of folks with these included packages.
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The included 60 day trial of MS Office 2003 is nice. It gives me a chance to see what’s new since Office 2000. I don’t know yet. I’m writing this using Word 2003. Both my writing and typing skills still sucks, so it’s probably not all that improved.
This is my third COMPAQ Presario machine. I always say I’m going to look at other brands, but they keep giving me good, reliable machines that do all that I ask. The SR1030NX does that plus some. It has great performance, really good graphics and all the multi-media power I need right now, but the front panel layout is the best I've seen. Not only will I keep it, but I’m recommending it to my friend(s). Its layout and performance, with a swallowable price tag, has got me loving this “new” boy.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 639
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: More than 256
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
joetrent
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Location: Riverside, CA
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 6 members
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