Customer Reviews

HP Pavilion tx2500z 12.1" High, Vista Home Premium

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

PROS:
- Its the least expensive tablet on the market
- Removable DVD Drive with Bay Cover
- Very nice keyboard
- Looks great

CONS:
- Short battery life (2.5 hours)
- Touchpad lacks horizontal scroll
- Super high-gloss screen is a pain in 80% of lighting conditions
- Comes pre-loaded with so much bloat-ware that it renders the computer unusable until you install your own OS
- Too heavy
- Its cheap for a reason--mine has been sent in for repair twice in 6 months

I really wanted to love this tablet. It was my first tablet and I had been looking forward to it for a while. Unfortunately I've been let down. After 3 months of ownership the RAM failed and I had to send it in for repair. After 6 months of ownership the tablet began making high-pitched digital noises, the SD card reader broke, and 1 of the quicklaunch buttons stopped illuminating. After getting it back from repair the second time, I posted it to eBay.

This laptop is really too heavy to be comfortably used as a tablet. It is impossible to use standing up, holding in the left hand and writing with the right. Your left wrist will quickly become exhausted.

As I said above, this comes loaded with so much proprietary software (bloat ware) that the computer is literally unusable. I reformatted the harddrive and installed Windows 7 beta and the laptop worked so fast that it was like an entirely new machine.

For the price, this tablet is unbeatable. Problem is that it is cheap for a reason. It is poorly made, it will break, it is a power hog with bad battery life. If you're looking for mobility, get a netbook. If you really must have a tablet, buy something slightly more expensive from a better company and save yourself a hot of headache in the long run.

PS. HP customer support has been very responsive and useful. I have no quarrels with them--just with their products.

I have wanted to buy a tablet pc for a long time now, and I did some serious research before making this purchase - and I'm glad I did. It's wacom penabled, which is a must for any artist, as well as being within a normal consumer/starving artist budget. All other tablet pcs were over $1000 which was just out of my budget.
There are a few things that I could live without however. The battery life is about 2 hours when running on high performance, which is nearly essential if you want to use it in tablet mode. The pen is delayed, but not enough to affect my artwork in a negative way. Sometimes when converting into slate mode the screen does not switch, and requires a restart. The processor runs very hot, but I usually use my laptop while wearing pants so its never uncomfortable. I can run firefox and Photoshop simultaneously with very little lag but if the processor gets hot it will slow down. All in all a great product for the price, with a few minor problems but the savings makes it worth it.

I bought this laptop in 2008. Esthetically, it's beautiful, glossy. The swivel screen is great, especially when travelling in tight airplane seats. However, after only a year I've had to reformat the hard drive once, I've lost icons to programs and have lost all wi-fi access. The computer does not recognize there is even a wireless card installed. Even the regular ethernet port is inaccessible at times. The worst part, is that HP has horrible customer service and they do not recognize the problems. It comes down to a terrible design flaw that makes its pieces incompatible with one another. The motherboard can be replaced, but eventually the computer will have the same problems. The pieces such as the wireless card and motherboard are perfectly fine. It's the way this computer and their pavilion laptop line have been designed and built that is defected. Even if you get an extended warranty, it will not make a difference because your computer will crash. No amount of repairs will fix it. I think HP has done something incredibly unethical for continuing to put these models out on the market knowing they have inherent problems. DO NOT BUY!!! It's one of the most affordable for a reason- it sucks!

I ordered me a tx2000 series tablet PC, custom built, directly from HP. Cost about 1100 after I had it customized to fit my needs for graduate school. Loved this computer, until the motherboard went out after having it only 13 months. A repair that will end up being about $350 dollars! The unit had a problem with overheating. This machine would get hot enough to burn your hand. The repairman says that sometimes when a computer gets that hot, the processor will also burn out too. Just do your research and definitely buy an extended warranty, but good luck with customer service. I bought me a 14.1 inch Sony Vaio, and although it is a couple inches larger, I got a more powerful machine and have yet to have it even get slightly warm with use.

I thought this was going to be a great computer but:

Cheap materials.
Very slow.
Heat issues, it gets extremely hot it gets you sweating, and if you put it in you lap it will literally burn you.
Short battery life (about 2 hours)
Noisy Fan.
Shuts down by itself at times, when you are in middle of something.
Comes with a lot of junk installed that just makes it way too slow, and paired with Vista it is twice as slow.
Very heavy and thick for a small pc.
I would recommend this pc if you want to get a headache, but surely you won't.
So consider it twice before ordering it.

First, I have to accept this is one of the best looking laptops on the market. That's why I bought one in 2007, series tx 1000. Price tag then: $2000. Exactly one year after the computer died, just like that. Even though HP customer service is awful, they replaced the motherboard, but after 3 months, it went dead again! The reason: Nvidia Geforce Go 6150, along with a hardware faulty design that causes excessive overheating. In some cases, before dying the laptop started to present different problems, wifi/bluetooth/ethernet issues, sometimes it would start, sometimes it just wouldn't. I understand the problem affected so many customers, HP decided to replace Nvidia GPUs with ATI's in newer models, however, after reading some reviews related to this much recent model (tx2500z) I can see not much has changed. For those feeling sceptic, the problem described is well documented in different forums and blogs all over the web. Do your homework, research before buying.

To make things worse HP has done nothing to fix this problem, even though a recall was the proper action to take.

Please beware. DO NOT BUY.

I bought my tx2500 back in mid 2008 and is still with me here in Dec 2011... It has endured years of transit travel rattle, long study sessions and calculations. Music, video, programming, photoshop, gaming you name it== which works fine for the most part, if not noisily and particularly always running hot!!... I run this thing to its max, its served me quite well, and its finally showing its age which is to be expected. The battery has been replaced, and the power cord too.. It stutters at Netflix / Hulu on occassion. But outputs fine to my 1080p...

I'd like to upgrade the OEM hard-drive to something faster... Great little machine and think with care, especially with aftermarket cooling, will last a lil while longer...

I bought this laptop before and was very very disappointed! It has blackscreen problem. I searched on internet and found other people also had such issue. It has hardware design bug which causing overheating. I threw away the laptop and bought a new one. I will not buy any hp laptop in the future. Good luck to you if you still want to take risk and try it.

I think most everything's been said here about this seductively designed tablet PC. Its style, features and pricing lure you into buying it but when you get it home, you find that its beauty is skin deep.

- It runs slowly
- It runs HOT - Ouch!
- The battery (that doesn't suffer memory problems) most certainly does
- The SD card reader latching mechanism has broken - see below
- The Digital Persona fingerprint security software is poor - see below

SD CARD READER - I could be sarcastic here and praise HP for inventing such an innovative device. Wow! An SD card reader? How DID they do that? But I won't because we all know they're incorporated in their squillions on everything from cameras and phones to digital recorders and - er - PCs where they serve reliably - often outdoors in harsh conditions - for years. Pity HP didn't choose a reliable SD Card reader. The latching mechanism on mine (and that of many others according to research) failed on probably the 5th time I'd used it. The card just pops back out. You can hold the card in against a spring strong enough to stop a Shuttle launch but after a few seconds, your finger-end goes dead (apart from having to operate the keyboard with only one hand). And HP just doesn't want to know...

DIGITAL PERSONA - The fingerprint reader is pretty slow and usually takes three or four attempts on cold boot but usually only one attempt thereafter. Strange.

But after about 4 weeks from new, a CRITICAL UPDATE Warning came up saying that I MUST update the Digital Persona software to maintain security. So I followed their hand-led instructions and guess what? The new software was a chargeable upgrade. So much for CRITICAL; it wasn't CRITICAL to me. Maybe it was CRITICAL to Digital Persona's bottom line?

Even then, I was suckered into buying it. And guess what? The installation stopped mid-way with a message that it was incompatible with my version of Windows. Now I haven't changed Windows. My HP TX is strictly OE. Don't Digital Persona know who they're marketing their CRITICAL updates to? Seems not.

But unlike HP, after I had sent them a CRITICAL email, a Digital Persona director not only issued me with compatible software, they refunded the cost of my original upgrade purchase. They come out of this smelling of roses.

OVERALL? I wouldn't buy another HP product. If HP cuts corners on quality, they should be prepared to stand by their product in the afterservice. They don't.

I wanted a tablet to draw on and this is a good one. Does not support pressure sensitivity (which is fine for my uses) and I could not successfully use a WACOM tablet plugged into it for some reason, probably driver compatibility issues. Is lightweight and sturdy, and has occasional slowdown but it acceptable. The built in wi-fi saved my bacon a couple of times! I wish I could figure out a way to disable some of the buttons on the screen though.. where I normally grab it usually activates the dvd theatre thing. I am too lazy to investigate further.

Battery life is fine.