Hewlett Packard Pavilion zv6130us (EC356UAR) PC Notebook

Yeah! Really, I bought the predecessor (HP Pavilion ZV5410US) about fifteen months ago. No hardware problems. Just a few dead pixels - that's average, I understand. I play a few DVD's on it weekly. I've used some demanding video editing, photo editing, CAD programs, drawing programs, games... you get the picture; it doesn't choke on anything. I paid $950 for it at Staples on sale. Very happy with it.

Now, to the point: I bought the HP Pavilion ZV6130US, the model under review, about seven months later on sale at Staples for only $900, $50 less the my first one, so that I could have another laptop for a different room of the house or to take somewhere. And you know what? It's even better that the other one! The keyboard is better and it has a nifty light to the left of the caps lock key so you can't mistake how it is toggled. The ATI video card has twice as much memory as the other (128MB) and I've run the iTunes 'visualizer' which showed it was producing up to 60 frames per second. Not too shoddy for a reasonably priced laptop. Additionally, the optical drive is a DVD rw, which means you can store over eight GB of data on one disk. Create DVD videos yourself. The CPU is a little faster than the one in my first HP.

It also can accept the new Express Card 54 and 34 as well as the older PC card standard. I use a Sprint AirCard 580 WAN which lets me surf the web anywhere! At DSL speeds of 500 to 1000 Kbps! The battery life suffers, though, while using the PC WAN card. The Athlon 64 is a powerful CPU which needs, guess what? a lot of power! This machine is best suited for desktop replacement. Otherwise, bring the brick along with you and sit near an outlet at Star*bucks or the library. You need long battery life? - spend twice as much for a So*ny. One can, however, buy a high capacity battery for this laptop. Better to invest in adapter cables to use on airplanes and cars.

The hard drive is a Serial ATA 80 GB unit which has scored well in a hard drive tuneup program I ran on it. The screen is bright and after six months has no dead pixels. The sound system is fine for a laptop, but I usually use earphones to listen to my several gigabytes of songs in iTunes. Few speaker systems under a $1000 do justice to most recordings, but many earphones sound super.

In the year I have had this HP Pavilion ZV6130US I have had zero hardware problems with it. As with any Win*dows computer, you have to keep your startup list of programs short, keep your hard drive defragmented, run a good registry tuneup program such as Regis*try Mech*anic (which found over 950 registry errors the first time I ran it on my previous HP! and that was after having to reload the operating system after Win*dows refused to boot - no problems since then because I run it weekly now). If you hear any complaints about this machine, you are probably listening to someone who, like Pogo of comic strip fame, could say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us!" One has to understand that Win*dows is the buggiest major microcomputer operating system in existence. Don't blame the hardware.

HP has an excellent website where you can download updates to the BIOS or the video card. HP computers come loaded with an excellent help system. When I was a professional business computer programmer/analyst on HP's 3000 series minicomputers in another life, we had a saying: HP stood for 'High Priced' - not any more! This series using the Athlon 64 CPU and the wide screen display is, as the French say: bon marche, cheap in price. But high in value. Frankly, I don't know how they make a machine this good and still manage to sell it as such a reasonable price. You don't need to pay $1500 or $2000 for a dependable laptop that has enough processing power for anyone but a hardcore gamer or a nuclear weapons designer.