Customer Reviews

HP Pavilion ze5185 Laptop (2.4-GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive)

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

 

 

Feature wise this HP looks similar to other high-end notebooks out there. What sets it apart is the extremely high quality display HP wisely endowed it with. With a faster response time, higher brightness, and more pixels, HP has outclassed its competitors with this offer.

The only benchmark Amazon offers if the pixel count (look under the Tech Specs), but you can use it as a good judge screen quality. The higher the count, the better the quality of the image (and it tends to indicate a newer, better LCD was used).

This notebook has a 1400-by-1050 LCD. Most of its competitors only offer a 1024-by-768 LCD, or at best a 1280-by-1024. By adding a LCD with 10% more pixels than the best the competition has to offer you get a sharper image (and sacrifice a little battery life).

At 6.4 pounds this is lighter than most, though not the lightest. It falls into the mobile desktop range (as opposed to thin-and-light) but thanks to higher quality components and engineer (it has a first class cooling system) you will see battery life that rivals notebooks aimed more for mobility than power.

You can find more mobile systems with more battery life, but you won't find one with the first class features this one has.

I have to say that this laptop's looking is awkward. Compare to Toshiba's or any other japanese brands, the HP's computers look especially big. However, when you look at the technical datas, you find its actual size is smaller and lighter than any other P4 2.4G. It's just a matter of appearance design.

This laptop has two fans, which means the P4 2.4G is very hot. But the noise is very acceptable. The DVD/CDRW drive is kind of noisy when running fast, but it's unavoidable.

Compare to Toshiba's, HP's have PS/2 port so that you can keep your old mouse with you. It has 3 USB ports while Toshiba's have only 2.

The battery can last about 2 hours and 15 minutes.

The touch-pad is wonderful. There is a touch-scrolling-bar on the right side of it. The touch-scrolling-bar is very easy to use compare to Sony's little wheel. It seems only HP has this wonderful idea.

One thing worth mentioning about this laptop is its very high LCD resolution. It's the highest you can find among P4 2.4G laptops. Of course, the fonts look smaller, but the clear LCD display makes small fonts comfortable and your desktop "bigger".

This laptop is more a desktop replacement than mobile computer. (fast, complete features as desktop) It's still movable but kind of big. If you really care the mobility, buy a P4 mobile CPU based laptop with a higher price. They are smaller and lighter.

I am sure you can get a very similar product from Toshiba much cheaper than HP. but I personally don't like japanese stuff. So this is the best i can find among non-japanese brands. If you don't have problem with japanese stuff, you'd better buy Toshiba's with a better looking and better price.

I've had nothing but trouble wth this computer. I've had to return it several times to Best Buy (where I bought it) and directly to HP. Neither has been able to fix the latest problems.

The power switch wore out quick. It takes several tries to get it to power up. The USB, serial and power connections on the back loosen up. I loose connections constantly.

They raved about the speaker sysystem in this thing, but it's barely audible. Use headphones instead!

The battery life is rediculously short. I've tried the buit in optimizer and other suggestions of "exercising" the battery, but it won't last 2 hours even when word processing. It won't last long enough to watch half a DVD.

The display still works fine now (the reason I bought this model). I had a flickering problem at first but HP solved that one. HP did fix the problem crashing often too. They alos repaired the doors on the floppy that felloff the first week I owned it.

This unit isn't beat on. I am the sole user of this system and it has been taken VERY good care of. Never dropped. Rarely taken outside my home.

It could be a great system if HP used better connectors and hardware.

Dave

After my desktop computer was stolen, I decided to go for a more compact unit. Without really knowing much about laptops, I decided on the HP ze5185. I was astonished at the speed and power of this wonderful unit. I use it both for business and home. I have had it approximately six months now, and have not had one problem. The display screen is excellent, and the speed, well, it certainly blows my old desktop away. I am competely sold on HP now, and will definitely by any future computers from them.

Display is better then my dell laptop. Resolution up to 1400x1050, my new dell can't go that high. display look sharper. Harddrive slow, put a samsung 80GB 7200rpm drive in run faster can now run video editing tool on this laptop wish it came with dvd burner. can't say how drive work change it to a TOSHIBA DVD-R/RW SD-6112 drive work very good, no overheating or shutting off when rendering videos, can't say the same for my dell which is newer. everything else runs good.
Cons
Have problem with the ATI MOBILITY M6 video card HP doesn,t have a driver for this model labtop on there site so computer use to shutdown when playing game or running video editing software even going on the internet.Since I am a computer tech I was looking for the corrected driver for this lapptop found it, but I warn you down use the driver that you get from 3rd party or what the people say on the sites they work but not correctly. will slow down the system and there will be a delay in the video, driver on other site are only design to run with the video cards chipset not with the laptop that why they can only be installed manually. the place you get the corrected driver is from (WWW.HP.COM) THEN PUT IN INSTEAD OF ZE5185 PUT IN XE4500 THEN DOWNLOAD ATI MOBILITY M6 DRIVER FOR WIN XP XE4500 HAVE THE AMOST THE SAME CHIPSET AS THE ZE5185, ZE5170. DRIVER WILL INSTALLED EASY WITHOUT HAVE TO GO TO CONTROL PANEL. YOUR LAPTOP WILL RUN VERY GOOD NO MORE VIDEO DELAYS OR SHUTDOWN. as for the rating gave it a 3 only because hp support is terrable they can't give you help on this problem they make it seem like the problem isn't known, and tell you all kind of other thing. and they didn't even give you the right disks they are for another model. Now that I have the right driver the laptop run great.

The computer was a problem from the first time I turned it on. Several video flaws, repeated crashes. The touch pad virtually stopped working after a few weeks. The benchmarks are terrible. The worst value for your money.

It is my first laptop. the only thing I like is the scrolling feature on the touchpad. Problems I found are:
1. the screen can only be viewed at exact 90 degree (too bad)
2. Power meter doesn't show correct power
3. Noisy cooling fan

I wanted to buy a reasonably powerful laptop, my criteria
fast
resolution something that went above 1280x1024/768
price
fast graphics
reliable

so far its done ok on price and resolution, its inexpensive.

HP support is terrible to non existant, which is odd because i've been a loyal hp customer with printers and found them amazingly good for that.

The graphics performance is abysmal, its about as powerful as an old 3DFX voodoo, its a 16 bit card really and doesn't support a lot of features that dx8/dx9 requires for speed.

External monitor ues displays a lot of noise, (using a belkin high performance $[$]video cable and 19 inch sony trinitron)

Reliable? Crashes are frequent and unexplained, i've tried it in various setups with xp home and xp pro, graphics drivers are typically unstable as is usual with ATI, adding an nVIDIA chipset to this laptop range would help with the biggest problem.

Its very quiet, i like that, it hibernates well. Though there are frequent startup problems, i seem to be past that with upgrade of gfx drivers and IO drivers, which i found out from other users not HP.

The laptop looks great with its pretty blue lights ;), the build quality is ok, the case is a little soft and scratches very easily, the clearance underneath isn't much and the design of the fan layouts, as is typical with P4 laptops, makes it not really work well as a laptop, it'll overheat

The disk subsystem is very slow, benchmarks are poor.

Battery life, around an 1 hour or so of decent use, default settings can mean it'll shutdown too late too fast.

Other problems have been that unplugging the external monitor, it wont flip back to the laptops display often, so you either have to plug it in or reset, the fn+monitor switch does nothing, this may be down to the upgraded M6 drivers.

Keyboard is good, touchpad is great, has some nice features

Speakers are adequate, a bit over hyped in the ad's

performance of the cpu is a bit slow compared to other 2.6 systems, probably the board and memory, sandra shows it weak performance

Power supply connector, terrible, it wil break easily, its right angled and a weak connector inside, you can feel it moving around and loosening up, a few people have already had them fail.

display quality is great

it has 3 usbs sockets and a 4 pin firewire which is nice.

CD drive is reasonably good no coasters yet, speed is good read and write

Bottom line is, its an ok laptop, but its not high end or "pro" use, good for email, web and game play for like q3a or halflife etc, high end graphics apps or recent games high FPS, forget it, battery life isnt good enough for a roadwarrior

i'm giving mine to my girlfriend , she'll love it.

I purchased this laptop in late October and since had to return it for repairs 3 times. It worked fine until I tried to run intensive graphic applications. When I sent it back to HP they replaced the hard drive and replaced the touch pad assy. When I got it back it still didn't run intensive graphic applications. HP advised me to install two special patches for the ATI card. After installing the patches, my laptop no longer started. Since I purchased a warranty with my laptop, HP agreed to replace the laptop. Unfortunatly today 3/5, the new laptop I just received won't start! I guess it is another call to HP. My advice is don't buy the HP pavilion ze5185 laptop if you are planning to run intensive graphic applications (business apps or games). After this experience, I will never consider buying another HP laptop.

First off the first thing I did was put a Gig of RAM in this puppy and now have used it for over a year. Never a problem have I had. I do programming for my job, and Star Wars Galaxies on it with no problems whatsoever. (Galstaph on Corbantis) I have never used a better laptop (for work) and it isn't bad for other things as well. I would suggest this to anyone (who didn't nead POWERFULL graphics).