Not for Geeks and programmers
Written: Sep 25 '06
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Pros: SD Card slot, stanalone CD/MP3 player, Cheap second hand.
Cons: Heats a lot, Battery life, potentially loose power connector, slow by todays standard.
The Bottom Line: Just ok if you are not for a very high speed
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| e_commentor's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Pavilion zt1155 (F3398H) PC Notebo... |
About an year ago I was looking for a decent laptop that I and my wife could use at home for internet surfing and a little bit of "work at home". I do not prefer working from home, but I do check and reply official emails. So I did not require a system that needed to be very recent.
Since I do know a bit of electronics I was also looking for "repairable" old computers on ebay. I saw this computer on ebay with the power jack problem. It looks like the loose power jack problem in HPs ZT1155 series laptops is quite common. The power jack is where you insert the A/C to DC adapter on the back of the laptop. Frequent insertion and removal of the jack makes the jack loose contact with the motherboard. The problem is excerbated by heat of laptop and poor quality connector and poor soldering quality.
I got the laptop. It takes more couple of hours to repair the jack. Even though actual repairing of the Jack is 15 minutes task. It takes a lot of time to unscrew and screw the hundreds of screws.
Once repaired I got the Windows XP screen. Nice. The previous owner did not have a password, and I did not had to reinstall software. I looked for any "funny" personal informations but I did not get. I did see some decent photographs.
Speed With 1.4 GHz Pentium Mobile, and 256 MHz of DDR RAM, it is not a fast computer. Not for some of the softwares that I occasionally try to run. I do not have any benchmark numbers, however, I "feel", it is only marginally faster that the 1 GHz Pentium III. So I do not recommend it at all for any programmer who will have to wait for infinity for the computer to finish compiling. However, it is good enough for surfing, and all other normal activity.
Connectors and Accessories The laptop has an inbuilt broadband Ethernet connector, inbuilt 56K Modem, two USB 2.0 connectors, an SD Cord slot, a firewire 1394 connector, audio and microphone jack. This is more than enough for most of the networking communication.
The 1394 firewire is handy for the digital video camera raw data transfer. I have not used it though for the lack of time and lack of hard disk space. It
The thing that this laptop seems to lack is in built wireless. It is almost essential now a days for mobile computing. You can still use a PC Card for wireless connectivity.
I have used SD Card slot extensively. I edit the photos and save them to SD Card using the SD Card slot and take it to Wal Mart for printing. Two of the USB Slots are always populated - one for an external mouse and other for webcam.
Character LCD, CD and MP3 player One of the special features of the ZT1155 is a small character LCD on the front side. It has few buttons that can be used to navigate the LCD. It shows time, Battery life even when Laptop is shut down. We can play a music CD or a MP3 CD even with the Laptop shut down. This is nice feature if you want to listen mp3 for hours without loosing batteries. I have however not used it frequently.
Issues
I could not get the Wireless PC Card up and running on this laptop. I am not sure if this is particular for this unit or this model. I could potentially work, had I reloaded the whole Windows XP again. But I did not try that.
The other issue I can see with this laptop is that it heats "substantially". You can feel the heat on the keyboards after the laptop keeps running for a while. This does not seem to affect the working in anyway. I never found the computer "freeze" due to heat or because of any other issue for that matter.
In overall I do not recommend this laptop. However if you are not using it for video compression, big software or compilation it should be a nice laptop if you can get it for $250 or less. If you are There are much better laptops available today - dual cores from AMD as well as Intel. And you can get a decent Laptop for $500 - brand new.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 225
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW
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Epinions.com ID:
e_commentor
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Member: Vikas Shukla
Location: Attleboro, MA , USA
Reviews written: 41
Trusted by: 16 members
About Me:
I am a hardware design engineer. I also provide SEO, Social media marketing consultancy.
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