HP Pavilion zv5270us Notebook PC (2.20 GHz Athlon XP, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD+RW Drive)

Rating:
Summary: Linux Friendly == No
Review: ***WARNING: DO NOT BUY THIS LAPTOP IF YOU WANT TO RUN LINUX!!!***

There are so many unresolved hardware issues with this laptop that installing Linux is more pain than it is worth, especially if you want to run it in 64-bit native mode. Broadcom refuses to release specs on their hardware or an adequate driver for Linux, so you will NOT be able to run the integrated wireless chip at all! You will be forced to run in 32-bit mode only and use ndiswrapper and the WinXP binary driver.

There is also an issue with this laptop at the hardware level relating to the timer pin and IRQ routing. Due to a flaw in the design you will need to boot the kernel with option 'noapic' and disable these features. Even in Windows you will notice the issues due to this problem, like hard disk clicking and slow system response times in certain situations.

The ALPS touchpad is also not supported out of the box on any distros and requires a kernel patch to obtain functionality. The audio is pretty good overall, but some key features are missing under linux. The firewire controller acts quirky. The win modem onboard has no driver. The PC Cardbus slot needs an option to disable a memory range to get functionality. ACPI has issues, again due to the timing pin hardware issue. And to top it off, the easy access keys on the face of the keyboard are not all implemented and supported under Linux (not really HP's fault, right?). However, a majority of the issues with this laptop can be directly attributed to the fact that adequate design specifications and/or open source drivers were not made available for the components of this laptop.

Rating:
Summary: THIS LAPTOP LOOKS LIKE THE BOMB!!!
Review: After reading through all the descriptions on this laptop, it is sleek and BEAUTIFUL and with all the capabilities, it's simply NICE! I'd definitely recommend it, the sleek design is GORGEOUS. And u can't forget all the amenities that this baby has! SIMPLY GREAT!