Customer Reviews

HP Pavilion A6200N Desktop PC (AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 5000+, 2 GB RAM, 360 GB Hard Drive, Vista Premium)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I don't have this model, but I do have two other HP Desktops. The point of this review is to warn you that most HP Desktops are significantly under-powered. The 6200 unit has a 250w power supply and the 6230 has 300w(per their parts list on the web site)... Although there is a lot of room to add-on, you can't do much with only 250watts. Most decent PCIe video boards require at least 350w. I have a model a1450n (300w) and a a6009n (250w), both AMD 64x2 CPUs. The a6009n has a mother board with a 24-pin input socket for power(as do most new motherboards), but the power supply only has the older 20-pin output (the extra 4-pins are supposed to be to get extra power to the mother board to accomodate various add-ons, including accessories/peripherals that use USB ports. It works, but just minimal power.

The thing that burns me is HP makes it quite difficult to get power supply specs because they know they would be a liability (but they sure promote the extra slots and expandability). The only way to find out is to actually look inside the case or check the parts list on their web site.

The bottom line is you should plan to replace the power supply if you're going to add-on much to your system. Besides the inconvenience, that's an extra $50-$150... and a wasted, useless replaced power supply.

I just got the HP Pavilon a6220n this week. For the price, it is a really good value. However, be aware that despite the fact that there is a fax/modem included, vista home premium does not allow you to send out faxes. Apparently, the faxing feature is only part of the Vista business or Ultimate versions. If you are considering upgrading from a computer with XP and planning on transferring your current software/ applications (Quicken, etc), be sure to check if your current applications are Vista compliant (otherwise, you should keep in account the cost of buying newer versions of your applications).

this is my second pc ( I had to return the first one)because it had a problem with the dvd recorder,also i called HP and they told me that it was a software problem and they sent me a recovery disk,that did not fixed it.

So I went ahead and had it exchange ,and now the dvd works but I received a warning on the total care advisor that read "your dvd driver may not be working" so the advisor ran a scan ,and it came out good.

But now I still afraid that it migth go bad.... So far so good ... we'll see.HP Pavilion A6200N Desktop PC (AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 5000+, 2 GB RAM, 360 GB Hard Drive, Vista Premium)

Other than that it's an ok pc for the price .

After looking at many brands, I finally decided that the wise decision was to go with the HP. For the money, no other brand could even come close to all of the many pros this machine has to offer. My internet is lighting fast and with the huge amount of space on the hard drive I reinstalled my Kodak Easy Share program. Even with this large program taking up hard drive space, it will take a long time for me to use the rest of it up! I love Windows Vista as well.

I am so happy with this machine and I wish I would have purchased it a long time ago!

HP Pavilion a6200n is supposed to be a well-designed desktop in every respect, however while having a PC geek doing the installation of the unit,I am quite shocked to learn that the DVI connector to monitor was NOT there as video card can still only display as analog,NOT digital - although nowadays quite a lot of ECONOMICAL brand/model desktops at about HALF-the-PRICE of the HP Pavilion a6200n do have BOTH analog and digital connectors to the LCD monitors.

I have been using the HP Pavillion A6220N desktop since about couple of months now. I bought it from the local computer store for 599 USD. The configuration included E4500 Dual core processor, 400Gb Hard disk, 2Gb RAM and other stock options.

Since buying it I have upgraded its CPU to a Quad Core Intel Q6600, Memory to 8Gb and added 2 Seagate SATA Hard disks in RAID0 (Striping) mode Like one of the other reviewers mentioned, the power supply had to be upgraded from the original 350W to 500W. I also had to buy SATA power and data split cables to use the 2 new drives. Also there is only space for one more Hard disk inside the drive cage - I found that a bit odd. So I had to put my 3rd HDD in an eSATA enclosure. For the eSATA enclosure to work I had to add a Silicon Image eSATA RAID card in one of the PCI slots where there was the modem originally. (I do not need a modem.)

I also upgraded the Graphics card - as I am no gamer I chose the cheap but sufficiently fast Nvidia 8400GS - remember the Graphics card that originally ships with this desktop is the Intel GMA X3100 and it does NOT have a DVI-Out port.

Overall the upgrades were easy.

I run Vista Ultimate x64 edition and it works fine - I had to download the 64-bit Intel AHCI drivers from Intel site and update the Realtek Audio drivers from HP product page but apart from that everything else was automatically configured.

Vista x64 runs great - suspending the computer works most times - very infrequently it fails to suspend, but it retries later and that succeeds anyway. It is stable and of course fast with the 4 CPUs and 8Gb RAM!

I also run Ubuntu Linux on it - it works right out of the box too. Something to know if you want to run Linux on it - there is lots of disk space to run multiple operating systems.

So if you are looking for something that works out-of-box with ample horse power or if you are looking for something that can be upgraded relatively easily to a high end machine, this is the right product at a great price.

None of the problems described by negative reviews on Amazon occurred for me at all. I purchased this PC a month ago. As I am a gamer I will be installing new Power Supply next month, along with new graphics card, but even as-is the system runs World of Warcraft (an older game) at very acceptable frame rates on medium settings. Make sure to disable all of the HP software bundled with this thing in Selective Startup, (its useless).

This machine is a perfectly fine desktop for basic needs, and is a great platform for future upgrades, provided you upgrade PSU, which many other reviewers also mentioned. The lack of a dedicated graphics card is also a pain, but as there is a wealth of expansion slots, including PCI Express 16, it isn't that big of a deal.

All of these Vista nightmares I expected never panned out. Vista just isn't that bad an OS, despite what I feared.

Highly recommended.

I am not a computer person, but realized that the 7 year old IBM I had was totally inadequate in every category of my needs. I primarily wanted a computer that could operate effectively on the internet. It needed to be fast enough to download videos and music, and otherwise support school projects, personal finances and home photos/videos. So, technically, this computer is probably capable of doing a great deal more than what I need and it is operating very well. I did get into a great amount of trouble because of trying to load my old programs. Apparently, Microsoft Vista is not compatible with alot of XP programs and I inadvertently froze the CD input. I called the HP help number and they patiently walked me through a series of troubleshooting steps that re-baselined the computer. It works fine now but I would caution people that Vista is not friendly to the unskilled, like myself. My bottom line is: Pro: the computer is a great value and operates fine. HP is excellent in their 1-800 support. Con: I would have appreciated a bit more of an owners manual. I wish I could have chosen XP or Vista, I definitely would have chosen XP and I don't know how to change it. So, if you're okay with Vista, I would say this is a great value.

The HP Pavilion A6200N Desktop is a rather stylish-looking (and very quiet) machine that a friend purchased as a replacement for an E-Machines PC that died. After trying Ubuntu (Gutsy) he wanted the same OS installed on this new machine. I'm pleased to say Microsoft Vista is no more - in fact, it never even got to start as I booted straight into an Ubuntu Install CD - and everything worked great out-of-the-box.

I would recommend this machine as an excellent buy for those who need a reasonably priced Linux box, with very good performance for the money.

Things I learned during the Ubuntu installation:

1) Don't accept the default video driver - choose 'GeForce6 series' - your performance will be massively improved,

2) There is no parallel port on this machine - you will need to purchase a parallel port card or a USB-parallel port adapter if you have an old parallel port printer,

3) To get DVD playing to work reliably, you need to install 'non-free' software from Medibuntu (http://www.medibuntu.org/). This is quite painless but unfortunately necessary. I found that without doing this, only one of my DVDs would play (which fooled me for a while, when I discovered others would not),

In short, this machine is a bargain and you can easily trash the bundled Microsoft Vista and put a decent operating system on it instead. For those who take issue with what seems like an inflammatory statement, I would only say that the person for whom I installed Ubuntu was delighted with one thing in particular 'You put a DVD or CD in and it just plays! Fantastic!'. Before, he had to do - to him - an unreasonable amount of Windows navigation to choose a DVD-playing program. Ubuntu delivered exactly what he expected - 'I put the DVD in, I want it to play'.

You can see why I didn't hesitate to wipe Vista from the newly-acquired machine!

I'm a strong supporter of HP. I purchased this machine and started using it. I was happy with the performance. Not crazy about Vista, but non the less was getting used to it. One day I came home to find the computer not working. Amazon will not replace or help, I had to go directly to HP for service. They were supposed to send a box here from Fed Ex but it still hasn't arrived due to an error on their part. 6 days later I'm still waiting for a box to send the unit in for service. They feel it is the system board or power supply. As you can imagine, I'm not real thrilled at this point.