HP Pavilion Desktop with Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor

[vegax64]

"hi, I purchased this with all the bells and whistles out of the gate, rather than worrying about customizing it and then upgrading later, because HP makes it so much less expensive this way. I had a lot of questions that weren't answered until I actually bought the thing, but I was happy with the answers once it arrived.

Facts: Comes with wireless A/B/G/N card and gigabit Ethernet. Shows up in Device Manager as an Atheros a/b/g/n dual-band wireless network module. The external antenna is connected to the system by a 2 to 3 foot cable so you can place it on a desk for better reception. The network card is a gigabit RealTek RTL8168C(P)-family.

The combination power light/on-off switch shines bright blue when on and amber when in sleep mode. The switch is located on the very top of the front panel of the computer on what is the top of the case, so it's very visible in a room without having to squat down or lean over to see it.

The system is fast with the quad-core and is already maxed out at its 8 Gb limit. There is a free PCIe slot (the wireless takes up one), a free standard PCI slot and a free PCI Express x16 for the video card that you'll eventually buy. With the standard graphics chip, you get a Windows Vista 3.5 Windows Experience Index with Vista SP1. There's also an IDE interface for a floppy on the motherboard, but no IDE for hard drives. The power supply is a 300-watt Lite-On.

You can add a two hard drives internally, plus a second optical drive. I think that you can put in a floppy drive where one of the second hard drives would go and it would have front panel access. There are connectors on the motherboard for four additional SATA devices and there are four available Molex power connectors plus one for a floppy drive. There are no parallel or serial ports available. It's a USB world out there now. The included card reader, that is located in the top front of the case above the CD drive, uses drive letters F: G: H: and I: at all times. The front panel has a slide down cover that reveals two USB connectors and speaker and microphone connectors.

I won't go into details about software other than to say that there aren't any backup disks provided, but they provide a wizard to make your own (B.Y.O.-DVD). The D: partition on the main hard drive is your recovery partition and all software is probably there in some compressed format. If you decide to remove an installed program, you may find difficulty reinstalling it without making the recovery disks first.

Pros:
Everything comes with it except for an upgraded video card
Good expansion capabilities with USB and motherboard interfaces
Good DVD and CD burning software included, including Lightscribe

Cons:
Keyboard has non-standard layout above arrow keys for insert/delete, page up/down, etc. Touch typists won't like it.

I switched from my previous computer vendor to purchase this HP because of all the standard features. I'm not disappointed at all in the quality of build or performance. My only planned purchase for this fully-loaded system will be an upgraded graphics card to match the system's other hardware capabilities."