Customer Reviews

HP Pavilion Media Center a1340n Desktop PC (Intel Pentium 4 Processor 640 (H-T), 1 GB RAM, 250 GB Hard Drive, LightScribe Drive)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For starters, this computer gives you a lot of firepower for the money. But that is where the good ends.

This computer comes with XP Media. For home use this is great. However, for professional use, it is useless. The HP website advertises XP Pro as an option. Anyone who knows XP will tell you that the standard proceedure is to do a "clean install" of XP Pro; which means reformatting the drive. The next step is to either install the necessary drivers from the supplied disk or website.

HP neither supplies a disk nor makes them easily available on their website. It took me three days of telephone calls (the online help is totally useless) before I was directed to the bowels of their website to find what I think are the drivers. Everything is sort of working now although I have still have a few minor problems going on.

Of course, their canned solution is to send me a recovery disk that will reformat my hard drive back to factory install. That would leave me right back where I started.

As I said before, this is a great machine. But the technical support is, for all practical purposes, non-existant. Before you buy a machine, make sure that the drivers are easily accessible.

This is a great PC. It has a processor fast enough to run all of the newest games, and a hard-drive big enough to store them all, right out of the box. The PC comes with Windows XP Media Center 2005 pre-installed, which is essentially identical to Windows XP Pro, so this PC can be used for just about anything you want to use it for. Photo-editing, gaming, software development - Windows XP Media Center Edition is fine to use for any of them.

I would recommend this PC to anybody looking for a relatively cheap PC with a lot of horsepower.

Have since upgraded the Ram, power supply, graphics card, sound card and a 2.1 speaker system for gaming, totaling $300 and I can play most xbox 360 games on it. Perfect computer for learning to upgrade cheap and still stay ahead of brand new computers.

The system is okay but needs more ram right out the box and a clean verison of windows installed. Two years now and I still haven't got all the adware and spyware off. Its good for your noncomputer people who are patient.

I purchased this from a CompUSA store in 2005...and I am still using it to this day!I added an extra GB of RAM to it and put in a PNY Nvidia 7900gs video card, (had to put nin another power supply for this hungry monster) loaded on Vista Ultimate...and an ancient TV card I had laying around...This is a wonderful Entertainment center for my bedroom...it's pretty quick! Like stated in a previos review..I can multitask like the best of them...On an average day here's what I do at the same time:

Watch TV
Chat on webcam
surf the web
d/l songs from itunes
edit up a photo in Photoshop
encode some video for my mp3 player

If you can find this PC BUY IT! Never had a problem! Period.

My family has had this computer for about 2 years and we've never had a problem with it. It always runs fast, even when I have itunes, Firefox, a game, and Photoshop all running at the same time. The built in card reader is extremely handy since it accommodates almost every type of card. 7 USB ports may sound like a lot but it is just the right amount. This computer is a great buy for anyone, and who can argue with a 250 GB hard drive.