HP Pavilion 503n Desktop PC (1.7 GHz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 40GB hard drive)

Rating:
Summary: H-P Computers
Review: In the past three years I have owned two different models of H-P computers and I was very sorry and disappointed with both of them. The first H-P I bought I took it right out of the box and it would not boot up nor would the replacement. I was assured by H-P that this was not usual. When I tried to upgrade to a larger hard drive I discoverd the BIOS would not support anthing bigger that a 4gig hard drive. I even took the thing to the local authorized H-P dealer and they could not upgrade the BIOS. Even after talking with the Tech support At H-P numerous times. The next H-P I purchased had a larger hard drive but the on board sound card and Video card made playing some of the better games impossible to do. The lack of an AGP slot and the lack of more PCI slots made my computing expiernce very frustrating. When my wife would be "on line" nine time out of ten she would be booted off the net and back to the desk top. So my advice to any one wanting to purchase an H-P computer better take a lot of Valium to deal with the frustration. These computers are for people who only look at the price tag, because yes they get a fast chip with junk components

Rating:
Summary: At this price it would be hard to beat
Review: This computer isn't perfect. The graphics are built in, can't be upgraded (no AGP slot), and not made to run the latest 3-D games at their highest settings. Their is also no DVD drive.

However at this price you are getting a fast CPU, decent graphics, and a CD-RW drive (much more useful than a DVD, who watches movies on their PC?). I think this is the best 'budget' PC out there.

If you can spend more, you should. If you can't or just don't want too, this computer will run anything other than high-end 3D games very well for years to come.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent value
Review: This system won't give you top performance but it's a good value for what it is. I bought an HP Pavilion 2 1/2 years ago that was state of the art for the time, and I've been quite happy with the quality and features of the system. One nice thing HP did is their keyboard has two USB ports on each side of the keyboard, and two more ports on the back of the box, for a total of 4. This has been great for hooking up a couple of ZiO! flash ROM readers/writers that I use as "fat" floppies without having to add an extra USB hub.

This system improves even on that and has 6 USB ports, which is very convenient. You should be able to hook up your keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, and two other peripherals without having to add capacity.

If you need performance, this system probably isn't for you. But the 1.7 GHz celeron chip is more than adequate for most applications. The system lacks a DVD, but I have one on my system and I've only used it once. The only use for a DVD on a PC at this point is to watch movies, and unless you're a laptop user and watch them on plane flights, you probably won't need it. However, they'll be more useful when games start coming out on DVD which require the higher storage capacity.

The system does have a decent CD R/W drive, but the graphics is an Intel Extreme Graphics chipset and is onboard and not upgradeable, but it does have 32 megs of video RAM, which is good enough for many games, but not for some of the more demanding ones, like Unreal Tournament 2003. You should probably get a minimum of a 64 meg and probably 128 meg video card if you're going to run games like that at high settings, such as using full 32-bit color, greater than 640x480 resolution, a high level of world and texture detail, or special effects like dynamic lighting, trilinear filtering, halos, decals, and so on. Also, the onboard chipset is PCI and not AGP. AGP is about twice as fast as PCI in terms of bus speed.

One great use for this system for someone like me would be as a separate Red Hat Linux box, so I wouldn't have to double-boot my own PC. I might even buy one for that reason. This would probably also make a great Linux webserver for most applications.

One futher suggestion, I haven't checked them out in a while, but the eMachine boxes have also offered good machines in the past. I don't know how their current model would compare with this one, but I know they're still out there and you might compare features and price with them too.

Overall, however, a good quality system that would probably be more than adequate for most people's needs at a competitive price, and I'd actually give it 4.5 stars if I could.