Hewlett Packard Pavilion zd8230us PC Notebook

I've been a laptop user for over ten years. Once you go mobile with a pc, it is extremely difficult to be tied to a desktop. The trade off is that you give up upgradeability for mobility. This machine as it is out of the box is good enough for most games, all office products, and most A/V software and still has enough processing power to handle more.

As the cliche goes, a pc is obsolete as soon as you buy it. This has traditionally been even more true for laptops. In the case of the HP Pavilion 8230us, this is much less true.

Monitor
It has a very clear 17" LCD monitor that puts every other laptop I have used to shame. The screen real estate allows for easy switching between multiple applications if necessary. It also makes for a fantastic DVD experience. There are no cons to the monitor.

Speakers
The native speakers are acceptable. This is a laptop, so high fidelity sound isn’t going to be a purchasing point, but these work at least as well as speakers standard for desktops.

Battery
We buy laptops for mobility and a good portion of this mobility is the battery. When fully charged, the battery will run about 2 hours when running applications that are not disk input/output intensive, less so when running more intensive applications. If you are on an airplane and want to watch a movie, the battery should get you from opening to closing credits for most non-epic movies. The con here is that the battery life isn't as long as they can be for smaller laptops. Another con is the size of the power supply; it is bulky and also fairly weighty. I believe the laptop itself is just under nine pounds. With the power supply, the weight is increased by almost two pounds.

Keyboard etc
The HP Pavilion 8230us has a full keyboard--number pad included. This is extremely helpful if you need to use the laptop for business functions that require lots of numbers. The mouse that is part of the keyboard has automatic scroll, tap-to-click, and (most importantly) can be turned off if a mouse is attached.

Ports
There are ample ports to run any peripheral. For ease of use, it has USB ports on each three sides.

General Usage
I can type nearly 100 words/minute on a laptop keyboard, so the ease of use for the HP Pavilion 8230us is more than acceptable. I can type for hours and not run into any pain, so the layout is at least not problematic.

This is a full keyboard, 17” LCD screen machine; it isn’t going to be ‘light.’ The weight isn’t generally a problem, but it can be if you have to lug it for long distances or pack it/unpack it multiple times. This is one of the trade offs for getting a larger screen and full keyboard. Along with this size comes an extra fan. The machine does tend to run hot, so you don’t want to keep it on your lap unless you like to sweat. Others have complained about the noise of the fans, but I don’t see this as a real con or problem. The fans are just part of the trade off to have a full featured machine that is portable but large.

I have had the machine for several months now and can confidently recommend it to just about anyone.

Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 1700
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: Greater than 15 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50