HP Pavilion zv5240us Notebook PC (3.00 GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

Rating:
Summary: Wow! Horsepower beyond expectations! It ROCKS!
Review: I have only had the HP zv5240us for a week so it is somewhat premature to review it but I figured I would provide my initial findings. The bottome-line; you can't beat the price for what you get. So far I have had minimal problems. I had a problem with my wireless network connection disconnecting, but that appeared to be a Windows XP problem that was fixed with the help of HP Tech Support. As for performance, my biggest concern was the 4200 rpm HD. I do video editing with Adobe Premier 6.5 and I figured I would tax the system and see how the 4200 rpm drive could handle Premier. As expected, while capturing, frames were dropped, but it took alot to drop them. I had my Sony VX2000 video camera connected directly to the computer through the firewire cable and began capturing. The first test I performed consisted of slow and smooth pans and zooms on still objects with no frames dropped. I increased camera movement speed until frames began to drop. Although frames were dropped, the movement required to drop them was much faster than what I would consider to be standard videography practices and close to the point of nauseating. I also ran the same tests with an external 7200rpm HD and no matter what I did with the camera movement I could not get frames to drop. With the 4200rpm HD, I also rendered a short 20 or 30 second clip in Premier and it seemed to work fine. The clip consisted of dissolve transitions as well as some footage with adjusted speeds.