HP Pavilion ZE1230 Notebook Computer (AMD Athlon XP 1500+ processor, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB Hard Drive)

by HP

Product Details

Product Manual [675kb PDF]

• Item Weight: 5 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00006ADJI
• Item model number: F5399H
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,193 in Computers & Accessories (See Top 100 in Computers & Accessories)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 19, 2002

Product Description

Have time for both work and play when youM-^Rre on the go with this HP ZE1230 laptop. At the heart of this laptop is an AMD AthlonM-^Y XP 1500+ processor, 20GB ATA/100 hard drive, and 256MB SDRAM memory that keeps everything moving smoothly. With all of that power and performance backing you up, you can easily knock out your work and then have time to view a movie on the 15" XGA+ TFT screen, or create your own CDs with the combo DVD/CD-RW drive.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice for the money, but..., October 17, 2002

By 

B-B-B (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP Pavilion ZE1230 Notebook Computer (AMD Athlon XP 1500+ processor, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB Hard Drive) (Personal Computers)

after a couple rebates, i effectively paid about [money] for this machine, and at the price, i'm not sure you can find a better box. part of me is wishing i'd blown another [money] for a beefier dell -- would've gotten a bigger hard drive than 20gb, a faster video card, s-video out, and stuff like that. but if you can live without the bells and whistles, this is a fine little machine.

out of the box, you get a 15" monitor, a dvd-cdrw drive, 256mb ram, and a 20gb hard drive. in words, it comes with pretty much everything you need to get started.

contrary to what a lot of people are saying, the computer is fast, particularly in floating point calculations. this may or may not be applicable to most users, but for me, i run mathematica, cubase, and logic predominantly, and the athlon is simply a better processor for these sorts of applications.

the video performance is really lacking. i didn't anticipate this would be a problem, but getting blocky dvd output can be annoying. it only happens occasionally, but when it does it's very irritating. and don't even think of playing any 3-d games on this; it will give you a grand three frames per second for most new titles. that is worse than bad.

essentially, you get what you pay for. hp skimps on the hard drive and video card, but the bottom line is that this is probably the cheapest laptop with a 15" screen out there. all told, if you can deal with its shortcomings, i would definitely recommend it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Cheap, light, 15" notebook, but with unimpressive components, December 28, 2002

By 

Dave (Portland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: HP Pavilion ZE1230 Notebook Computer (AMD Athlon XP 1500+ processor, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB Hard Drive) (Personal Computers)

There are not many 15" notebooks in this price range, but HP has achieved this by using second-class components. The 15" display is a low quality 1024x768 pixel display with a well over 45ms response time. A 15" LCD should have 1280x1024 pixels in order to provide a sharp image. You need at least a 25ms response time to avoid "trails" in games and other high frame rate applications. 1024x768 should be for 14" LCDs only.

Not that you could play newer games with the Via ProSavage graphics chipset. The now defunct S3 graphics company designed it years ago. Via bought up the graphics division, and is probably selling this ancient chipset for next to nothing. This is fine for card games but don't get your hopes too high.

At this price range you can get a 14" laptop with a superior graphics system, faster CPU, and faster memory (this computer is equipped with slower SDRAM not the twice as fast Double Data Rate SDRAM that is standard on 90% of the notebooks sold today). I suggest the HP xt125. Dell, and Gateway have good offerings in this price range as well.

On the good side you get a 15" screen very cheap, and the DVD drive is a little faster than most notebook offerings (16x vs. 8x). It is also very light for a 15" notebook.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The PC is obviously slow. Everything else is good., September 11, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: HP Pavilion ZE1230 Notebook Computer (AMD Athlon XP 1500+ processor, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB Hard Drive) (Personal Computers)

I purchased this one from best buy with a price mistake. No fret about the good price. I like the whole design and it is very neat. The screen is sharp and big enough. XP is running fast and smoothly when it was opened.

After playing it for a while, I found a big problem. The machine seems running too slow at the processor speed it marked. If I open the XP control panel -> system, I found the speed sometimes shows 1.3G but most of the time it shows a smaller value such as 745M or 450M, etc. I learned from Internet that HP would attribute that as XP glitch. So I downloaded prime95, 3DMark and Performancetest (from download.com) to test the machine. All tests shows the CPU performance is very good or right at its true level, but the 2D and 3D image/animation test result is very bad. Also memory and hard drive speed are slow. The overall performance is compatitable only to a PIII 800M laptop in the 'baseline' those program provides.

Then I tested DVD, real player and windows media player. All worked smoothly. I guess this is absolutely not a game PC. I am not playing games any way. I believe this is because the bad design and (low quality) video chips that HP uses on this model. Not really a quality problem.

Then the big trouble came. I started the preinstalled MSN messenger, trying to talk with my dad overseas. We talked a minute or two. Then I lost the sound. I open other program which would use sound function, the PC is frozen. I have to reset it back. However, when I open the MSN messenger after that, the sound system won't work and PC would often freeze if I open another sound application such as windows media player. Then I installed the yahoo messenger and hook up my logitech web cam (which I purchased 3 years ago. the XP recognized it immediately). The PC freezes every time when I launched cam on Yahoo messenger. The voice problem also happens on yahoo messenger. Then I tried the same web cam on my old IBM Win98 machine, it ran for 3 hours without problem.

I chatted with HP tech support and they told me this would probably a software problem. So I reinstalled the whole XP and downloaded new XP driver from logitech web site. The same problem still happens.The next step is to install a Win2k OS on this one and see if the same problem happens.

With this problem, I don't think HP is doing a good job:

1. Hardware desgin is too cheap (because of the low price?)
2. Tech support is not very helpful.