Home > Consumer Reviews > HP Media Center M490N Desktop PC (3.4 GHz Pentium, 512 MB RAM, 250 GB Hard Drive, DVD+R/RW)

This whole MediaCenter serie still needs a lot of improvements. The computer is decently priced but the applications are not all integrated with the MS MediaCenter. The MC application is often buggy and often crashes. It also makes use of additional external apps very hard. The motherboard on mine was faulty and made the computer unable to reboot after 2 weeks. Even the front bezel was defective. I noticed that the same problem was noticeable on demos in stores. Also, don't expect external soundcard or video card to be compatible...i learned it the hard way with my creative card.

To top all this, HP Support is mediocre at best. They ask you to ship them your computer and return it back to you a week later with no comments, no names of repair person, and even in my case missing parts that got stolen. You won't know what they tried to repair and just hope they didn't wipe your hard disk for no reason.

I have had this Media PC for 4 years now and it has worked very well and it has just about everything you'll need or want. The only thing I did was upgrade the RAM. If you're going to edit video and pictures, it takes up a lot of space and memory, so if you don't like to wait while the PC catches up with you, then you will diffinetly want more RAM. Additionally, I purchased an external hard drive to store videos and pictures as 250 GB of space sounds like alot, once you get going with the video editing, you'll be greatly suprised how much space will be used up. Overall a great little PC HP! :)

I am very happy with this HP media Center.What more can I ask? I can watch TV, record TV same time if I wanted to by pushing the record button on my remote control.