Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 540N Desktop (1.5-Ghz Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive)Platform: Windows XP Home Edition
Brand: Hewlett-Packard
Binding: Personal Computers
Warranty: 1 year warranty
Features: - Intel® Pentium® 4 processor
- 1.6GHz, 256DDR SDRAM, 40GB
- CD-RW, 56K, NIC, XP-Home
Beware the dark side of HP... [Posted on 2002-04-07]
This isn't a review of this exact model of HP computer, but one very similar that was recently out-moded. As computer technology moves so fast, models that were hot 6 months ago don't even exist now. Still, I've found that a generic "$[money] HP computer" has most of the same problems, many of the same short cuts made to cut costs. In my HP, the specs sounded very fast and powerful - 1.2 Ghz, 30 gig hard drive CD writer, nice software bundle, 128 meg memory. Upon getting the computer home, I found it to be very professional, everything worked well, Windows hardly ever locks up or freezes, and things work smoothly. Except... HP cut corners to save money, and it shows. Loading a program on this modern 1.2 Ghz computer can take over 2 minutes, and I'm talking Internet Explorer, which should take 16 seconds. American Online often takes 5 minutes. Unacceptable. This stems from getting a cheap, slow hard drive and a motherboard with a small cache and slow IDE interface. It doesn't matter how fast the processor is, or how much memory you have, you still have to wait for your programs to load from the Hard Drive. I still find that $[money] buys you a better computer from Dell or Gateway than anything you can get from Best Buy. Compaq, HP, IBM, all of these manufacturers make cheap computers to sell at Wal-Mart and Best Buy and similiar places. They cut corners to max out their profits, and I've seen people complain again and again about such "Deals". Beware.
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