Home > Consumer Reviews > HP Pavilion M9360F Desktop PC (2.50 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q9300, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB Hard Drive, Blu Ray Drive, Vista Premium)

OK, after about a month of research and toggling between several different makes and models, I settled on the HP Pavilion Elite M9360F, based on great reviews which I had read online (on this site and many others) plus an impressive array of seemingly high quality components that this PC claims to incorporate in its assembly.

I placed my order online (from another highly reputable online seller N E W E G G , as Amazon was out-of-stock ...) at the beginning of September and barely 7 weeks into its operation, suddenly one day I heard high pitching noises which kind of immediately lead to the complete freezing of this almost new PC!!!... I knew it immediately, uh uh, it was the frigging HD!!!... Now, I do not mess around with computers and I do not add silly external attachments, etc. I do not game although I like to enjoy some Media (hence the reason for purchasing this PC) and I mainly use my PCs for business and online (Internet) purposes. Right off the bat, I was unimpressed with this computer's wireless LAN capabilities, although the blame could also be placed in other areas. However, the WLAN on this much newer PC was not even as good as my almost 3 year old Acer laptop from the very same location.

Anyway, cutting a long story short, after spending hours with HP technical and wasting much time following silly time wasting procedures in the BIOS and reloading the recovery disks for the 3rd time, it was decided that the PC had to be sent in for service to possibly replace the HD and the OS (Vista Home Premium 64 Bit) after failing to reload/upload windows. Moral of the story: Please be very cautious if buy an HP product. Granted that I could have very well been unlucky and 99 out of 100 this may prove to be all that it is billed for, but I certainly have my doubts. What has me further cautious about this PC is that it is now a "deactivated" item on the site where I purchased it from, which is always a red flag (after all, this PC only came onto the market in May of 2008) and since I was unable to leave a product review/feedback/gripe over there, I decided to do it hear.

My caveat is this: YMMV but I am clearly unhappy and not trusting of HP and their products. This is the last time that I would ever buy an HP and BTW, this is the second HP Pavilion that has failed me in the past 2 years. So, fool me twice and the shame is on me :-(

This is a great pc. I expected it to be a very good machine to perform all of the tasks I needed and then some. For the money, I would recommend anyone to purchase this model.

This machine is great out of the box. It handles multimedia applications with speed and grace. I can open a game, a script compiler, adobe photoshop, adobe reader, and word all at the same time and have no serious speed drop in any application; multi-tasking is this computer's middle name. The video card can handle even the most intense games at highest settings. Plenty of storage and RAM. Very well rounded PC for a power user.

My gripes are that the wiring on the inside is pretty sloppy and tight. On top of that, there is only one PCI slot for upgrading (if you can fight past the wires). I knew this when I bought it, but there should be a couple of PCIs and maybe a PCIe or two available for updates. Also, another PCIe x16 on the board would have been nice for running SLI video cards, but I can live without that for now.

I thought about building this machine at home instead (I could have had more expansion as mentioned above), but the price on this is so good that I could not have really built it for less. To make a similar machine at home, I would have spent a few hundred more that this cost.

I added an external sata adapter to run my external hard drive and everything is working very well.

I am pleased with the machine and would recommend it to others as long as they can live without much upgrading and without SLI video.



[EDIT 4/11/2009]
After eight months I finally had a reason to try to use the front panel AV inputs. I can not get any software to pick up a signal on the front connection AV inputs. I am pretty sure this is some sort of hardware problem or that the machine is not configured right for the AV ports. So, I called HP for support and was given a one hour run around to be treated rudely at the end of the call. It was obvious that the "tech" did not know his stuff and was having further problems communicating with me due to an obvious language barrier. When I asked to speak to the supervisor, the "tech" hung up on me.

The computer, aside from the dead front AV ports, is nice . . . but HP tech support has really gone down hill over the years.