A Notebook for less than $800 with a CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive, 256MB of DDR memory, a large 15 inch screen and 64MB of video power. After rebate the actual cost came to $799 plus my local taxes. It weighs at about 7 Ľ pounds making it easy for anyone to haul around.

The power behind the ze4420us is the AMD Athlon XP-M 2200 Plus Processor, I know some think this is too slow but I can tell you that is runs very good and fast. For on the go the Notebook does not have to be as fast as the home PC, at least for me. They use 256MB PC2100 (266Mhz) DDR memory; the 266Mhz matches the front side bus.

A notebook like this is great for my schoolwork and editing my digital photos when on a trip. It makes a great storage place for your digital photos with a 40GB hard drive, all I do is use my Zio card reader and plug it into the back USB port and I can easily download my photos onto the hard drive. A 40GB hard drive is a lot of storage for a notebook.

Other things you can do with this notebook is on trips it is a portable DVD movie player and play games on it for entertainment.

The CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive will play your DVDs, play your CDs and record on CDR and CDRW media. The DVD reads at 8x speed while the CD reads at a 24x speed. CD write & rewrite run at an 8x speed.

The 15-inch screen is true 15 inches giving you almost the view of many 17-inch monitors. HP uses an integrated ATI Mobility Radeon 4x with 64MB of memory to give you a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768. Bottom line; DVD movies, photos and games all look great on the screen.

The Notebook integrates a 16-bit Sound Blaster Pro-Compatible for audio, there are volume controls on the left side of it with inputs for speakers and a microphone.

One feature I find neat is the blue strip on the top of the keyboard that glows for your multimedia keys. The touch pad is also an area that I like; touch pads are much easier to use now than a few years back. I still prefer my optical cordless mouse!

Integrated is a 56K (V.92) modem and for the broadband lover they integrated a 10/100Mbps NIC. All kinds of connections all around the notebook, two USB ports, serial port, parallel port, S-video port, VGA port for an external monitor and more.

Upgradeable is rather limited as with all notebooks because of room. It does have two PC card slots for Type I, II, III and 32-bit Cardbus. There are two slots for memory for the maximum of 1GB.

Two recommendations I have are practically for all notebooks; first of all buy an extra battery, this notebook eats them up somewhere between 2.5 to 3 hours and then you will have to recharge it again. It comes with an 8-cell Lithium Ion
rated to go 4.4 hours but I have never gotten that out of it. Second, if you are going to watch movies, listen to music, or play games on it; then I recommend external speakers to carry along that give it the extra sound you need but are also portable.

Overall, the price I think it is a good buy. It comes with Windows XP Home Edition preloaded with some other software. It is easy to use and seems durable enough to last for many years to come.





Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 799
Operating System: Windows
Processor: AMD Athlon (K7)
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 15 inches
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40