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

Amazon Customer Reviews

(5 out of 5)

So Far Pretty Impressive

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.

(5 out of 5)

Wow! Horsepower beyond expectations! It ROCKS!

Although the specs say 533MHz FSB, the 3.0 MHz P4 that HP dropped under the hood is the Hyper-Threading enabled 800 Mhz FSB variant on 90 nm process technology! Intel's Frequency ID Utility proves it. Also, the Mobile Radeon 9000 uses 128MB, double the 64MB advertised. All in all, this mid-priced desktop replacement notebook is a real winner! If you want a multi-tasking powerhouse, get one of these wide-screen beauties! Thanks HP! (from a BIG kid!)

(5 out of 5)

ABSOLUTELY AWESOME

GREAT BANG FOR YOUR BUCK. CAN'T GO WRONG. A VERY SOLID WORKHORSE.