HP Pavilion ZE1115 Notebook (1.1GHz AMD Duron, 256MB RAM, 20GB Hard Drive)

Rating:
Summary: It's an HP...and it shows
Review: I received this laptop 3 years ago as a present...at first it worked fine...but then it became nonstop hassle. I also received the extended warrenty...as is with those kinds of things, you send it back every time theres a problem, to a 3rd party, and they send it back, sometimes fixed...my problem was, it would randomally shut down. This is a feature of the processor, I knew, so it was overheating. First off, the company insisted on outrageous tests...trying the power adapter on DIFFERENT OUTLETS...leaving it on for days at a time...things like that. Eventually they admitted it was a problem, so they sent me packaging, I sent it back, a few days after they received it, I got it back...same problem. I let it go on for about a month, then called again, jumped through their hooops, sent it back...when it returned, STILL THE SAME PROBLEM. My warrenty ended a month after that so I waited (something even worse couldve taken place, that is why I waited), then I opened it up. Laptops are cooled by thing, very crappy devices called heatpipes...they don't work very well, basically they just move the heat from once place to another (from the processor, to the outside where a fan is). The heatpipe's retention was BROKEN OFF so it was literally held in place by one screw, and the pressure of parts over top it. I looked closer...and the retention's screw pegs (parts it screwed into) were (at one point) literally GLUED onto the motherboard...no screws, nothing secure, GLUE. Of COURSE that would break off! I tried to fix it myself, it has held together for the past 6 months, until today. I can't fix it again, so I am scrapping this, selling the parts, and hopefully getting a new notebook.

The moral of the story: when it works, it works how you'd expect it to (not entirely quickly). When it doesnt work, don't ever expect it to.

Rating:
Summary: Solid performance, XP advantages, poor audio
Review: This has been a good work performer for me. The energy-saving Duron stays at 550mhz most of the time, thus keeping the notebook cool, and doubles in speed whenever an application could benefit from it. The bundled softare is not too intrusive (like MS Works) and easy to remove. It's completely XP compatible, so it's very stable, boots and shuts down very quickly, and is easy to update and operate. The DVD drive does flawless DAE, which is an important feature to me. The Musicmatch utility program is surprisingly good at doing an automated conversion of cd's to mp3's with all the correct id3 tags, all in just a couple of keystrokes. The "bad" is that this is not a computer for gaming. The video is "integrated" so it's fine for 2d applications, but not for 3d gaming. The sound is the major disappointment in that the computer is incapable of playing any music (whether from mp3 or in a game) without stuttering. This is true even if I turn off every memory resident program: an expert told me that this occurs from a hardware conflict, but the chip is a combined modem and sound chip, and so they share an interrupt with no way to change this. In addition to this problem, the built in speakers sound lousy, and the volume scale is poorly designed, so a 'O' out of 16 is mute, but a '1' out of 16 is already fairly loud. Still, the computer has been otherwise a solid performer for eight months.