Home > Consumer Reviews > HP Pavilion A500N Desktop PC (2.08 GHz Athlon XP 2800+, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Combo)

I read the other two reviews and that's not the same PC I got when I opened my Brand New Boxed a500n.
It works perfect, effortlessly, and is easy to use and easy to upgrade. I put in another 512mb of Ram for $59 and a 120GB HD for $59 and Wow! It took 10 minutes thanks to the easy access panel with thumbscrews. I run three printers while doing graphics and surfing the net at the same time without slowing down. It does everything easy with all the bundled software and Windows XP-Home. WP to DVD to CD-RW's to Photo Editing, grahics publishing, etc...

Let me first say that Amazon delivered just fine and the computer arrived on time. Now, I hooked up the computer and there was a message on a black screen that said something along the lines of Disk Boot Error, Please Inster Boot Disk and Press Enter. Bios wasn't seeing a hard drive so I went in an forced Bios to boot the hard drive first. Still didn't recognize it. I called HP and they sent me the recovery disks, which contains a whopping 7 disks (cd-roms). I put them in and it said No Operating System Found. There was no operating system installed on this pc! I called HP AGAIN and said that the disks didn't work, so they are sending me a new hard drive. I have waited for a total of 2 weeks for the computer to arrive and to get it up and running, this is rediculous. I will write another review or edit this one if possible if and when I get the HP up and running.

its a very compact unit, nice look and the slots for memory sticks and cards r easily accessible in the front but this maseen is too slow on processing speed....its sometimes slower than the old AMD athlon K7 that I owned...and there is no space in the front to slot in myh old drive for swappin
the games it came with r great... but still for the money I coulda got somethin better

Great MB, has 5 usb 2.0 front 3, rear 2
2firewire plugs front 1, 1 rear
audio plugs both front and rear headphoneplug,input, and mic up front.

Motherboard includes 2 SATA plugs, so potentialy 8 Sata, and one additional Ide HD (9) total "potentialy"

2Ide connectors onboard CDr/w and DVD HD is using a proprietary cable so u have to order annother cable to fill the last ide device (money grubbers)

unfortunatly there is no way to mount even just 1 additional HD, without purchasing THEIR HD "cage", which I could not find on their website, despite their correspondence that said it was.

Powersupply 250W BARE MINIMUM, I will have to upgrade case to intall more HDs, and the power supply for ANY casefans.

No Recovery CD included, but u could buy one from them (money grubbers) they did put a recovery Partition on the HD subtracting 5 gigs from the 60Gig HD