- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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4.5 stars
"Tomorrow's pc today"
Pros: truly quiet, ample power and speed, tons of ports
Cons: HP's kludgy business-oriented software regime
Summary: This is my idea of what all pc's should be today: super quiet, reasonably small, lots of speed and memory, and ports for all purposes. The CNET editors' complaints about upgradeability come from a lack of imagination: the modem slot gives you a place to install a board after you give up dialup (which you must to enjoy what this pc has to offer) and having usb, ethernet, firewire, and a dozen kinds of card reader slots gives you all the options you could want. Using Intervideo Windvd I'm able to watch dvd movies in glorious full resolution and color on an lcd widescreen monitor and multitask underneath it if I want! This is the pc to put in your living room and use as a media player. The hardware is first-rate and will do the job.
I would have given my slimline a 10, but HP is pretty backward about configuring the os desktop for home users. Too much spyware and freeware come with the os and hp's own disc backup utility relies on a trial copy of Roxio which wasn't even loaded properly, a big no-no. Configuring profiles and passwords for separate users gets tripped up by the ghost "HP administrator" whose profile always seems to steal your place in the hierarchy. Still, Windows media player is there and once you prune out the deadwood software and add your own you've got a great pc.
