Customer Reviews

HP Pavilion ZE1115 Notebook (1.1GHz AMD Duron, 256MB RAM, 20GB Hard Drive)

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

 

 

This has been a good work performer for me. The energy-saving Duron stays at 550mhz most of the time, thus keeping the notebook cool, and doubles in speed whenever an application could benefit from it. The bundled softare is not too intrusive (like MS Works) and easy to remove. It's completely XP compatible, so it's very stable, boots and shuts down very quickly, and is easy to update and operate. The DVD drive does flawless DAE, which is an important feature to me. The Musicmatch utility program is surprisingly good at doing an automated conversion of cd's to mp3's with all the correct id3 tags, all in just a couple of keystrokes. The "bad" is that this is not a computer for gaming. The video is "integrated" so it's fine for 2d applications, but not for 3d gaming. The sound is the major disappointment in that the computer is incapable of playing any music (whether from mp3 or in a game) without stuttering. This is true even if I turn off every memory resident program: an expert told me that this occurs from a hardware conflict, but the chip is a combined modem and sound chip, and so they share an interrupt with no way to change this. In addition to this problem, the built in speakers sound lousy, and the volume scale is poorly designed, so a 'O' out of 16 is mute, but a '1' out of 16 is already fairly loud. Still, the computer has been otherwise a solid performer for eight months.

Half of the problems with any computer are user related. I obtained this laptop after the previous owner thrashed it. She had a 65w adapter on a min 75w system. Fried the HDD & battery. She broke the clip in the cd-rom drive and broke the DC Jack.

After I obtained it, I bought the proper OEM 75w adapter, changed the optical drive to a CD-RW/DVD-Rom combo drive, doubled the RAM, added a new 80GB HDD, and replaced the thermal compound with Artic Silver 5.

The DC jack is EASILY replaced. Three solder points and its released. I bought an OEM jack for $2 and this machine has been glorius ever since. $145 in parts and upgrades and this machine easily runs vista beautifully however it runs XP Professional now and has run three distrobutions of linux. The linux setup out of the box detected all hardware properly and works great (if you are a stage 5 user).

The RAM is expandable to 1GB, optical can upgrade to a DVD Burner and the Processor using AMD's CPU_ID program is capable of 1.4GHz.

Don't let someone else's mishandling of the laptop sway you from buying a great piece of equipment. A laptop isn't indestructible nor will they ever be.

I love mine, and take it with me everywhere!

This unit suffers from the probles ALL HP notebooks.

The reciever which you connect the power to is a peace of junk.

It is made from brittle plastic designed to break if it comes under too much stress.

Good idea, but stupid implementation!

You have to replace the WHOLE system board if it breaks! HP wants $600 for a new system board! When I told HP parts that, they said "Oh let me transfer you to sales!"

Yea right!

I took it to a local shop for someone to replace the broken reciever and they told me that HP is the worst about the power recievers!

Never buy an HP! <delete><delete><delete><delete> Always buy an HP! Want to buy mine? Cheap?

I received this laptop 3 years ago as a present...at first it worked fine...but then it became nonstop hassle. I also received the extended warrenty...as is with those kinds of things, you send it back every time theres a problem, to a 3rd party, and they send it back, sometimes fixed...my problem was, it would randomally shut down. This is a feature of the processor, I knew, so it was overheating. First off, the company insisted on outrageous tests...trying the power adapter on DIFFERENT OUTLETS...leaving it on for days at a time...things like that. Eventually they admitted it was a problem, so they sent me packaging, I sent it back, a few days after they received it, I got it back...same problem. I let it go on for about a month, then called again, jumped through their hooops, sent it back...when it returned, STILL THE SAME PROBLEM. My warrenty ended a month after that so I waited (something even worse couldve taken place, that is why I waited), then I opened it up. Laptops are cooled by thing, very crappy devices called heatpipes...they don't work very well, basically they just move the heat from once place to another (from the processor, to the outside where a fan is). The heatpipe's retention was BROKEN OFF so it was literally held in place by one screw, and the pressure of parts over top it. I looked closer...and the retention's screw pegs (parts it screwed into) were (at one point) literally GLUED onto the motherboard...no screws, nothing secure, GLUE. Of COURSE that would break off! I tried to fix it myself, it has held together for the past 6 months, until today. I can't fix it again, so I am scrapping this, selling the parts, and hopefully getting a new notebook.

The moral of the story: when it works, it works how you'd expect it to (not entirely quickly). When it doesnt work, don't ever expect it to.