Customer Reviews

HP Pavilion a700n Desktop PC (Athlon XP 3000+, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

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

 

 

The HP Pavillion is a very good computer. It is moderately fast, has a good sized hard drive and plenty of RAM. Also it has a lot of USB ports (7) and two firewire ports. Why four stars and not five? The first one I had blew after 2-3 weeks but the new one has been fine for 3 months.

[...] Cheap! HP's reputation for quality is less than stellar, so I took the thing home and tried to kill it. Ran it all night every night for a week running multiple sessions of MS Access, playing streaming audio from the web and running a slide show from three drives (one an external USB hard drive) using several hundred images of 1-2MB each, changing every second. The CPU cooling fan ran full time. Hard drive and CD both ran almost constantly. Machine did not miss a beat. Two months later, it still works fine.

On the downside, I spent HOURS cleaning pre-installed junk software off the thing. Freed up several gigabytes of hard drive. I guess at the price, HP's only chance to make a buck is through fees from software vendors.

2006-01-02 update:
Added 512MB of memory last April to bring total to 1GB. Easy ten minute upgrade. Months later, the machine is still running with no problems... except: I installed a piece of suspect software two months ago that caused a conflict of some sort and then hang-ups at boot time. So, I moved all the date off to my USB hard drive, crossed my fingers, swallowed hard and clicked on the included HP utility that restores the machine to as-delivered condition. Less than an hour later, I had the machine in the same condition it was in as purchased. I reinstalled my software, moved my data back from the external hard drive and was back in fine shape. HP's "Restore" function works! (Do not confuse this with the Windows XP restore points. Those would not correct the problem I had after the software mishap.)