New HP Pavilion PC designed for digital geeks

Zatni Arbi, Columnist
zatni@cbn.net.id

My wife has been a happy user of an HP Pavilion 9850 desktop computer for a couple of years. The only component that I ever had to replace was the power supply, and that was because I failed to immediately replace the battery inside the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) that I was using for this PC.

Yes, without the UPS, it will be difficult to expect a long life from your computers if you live, like I do, in the West Jakarta area, where the quality of the power supplied by our beloved electric company is quite poor.

The high-end-for its time-mid-tower PC runs on a 1.3 GHz Pentium 4 processor, which was one of the first Pentium 4 members to become available at that time. It also uses Windows Me, which was already installed on the hard disk when we bought it.

Most importantly, it allows my wife to do her work -- which involves a lot of Web surfing, communicate with me by e-mail each time I am away on a trip, and do a couple of other things for the neighborhood community where we live.

Of course, over the years HP -- which is now known as HP/Compaq -- has improved its Pavilion series in many ways. Today, we can choose from several different Pavilion models, depending on how much we want to spend. However, as usual, I am more interested in high-end models.

Thus, when HP launched its new Pavilion PCs, I requested a loan of their demo unit. It turned out that they let me use a brand-new unit of Pavilion t488d for my review.

Complete arsenal

It is hard to find any multimedia feature that HP has not included in this PC. Strangely, unlike the 9850, the new Pavilion t488d that I played around with came in a mini-tower housing. The design was more stylish, although a bit boxier. It ran on a 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-threading technology, and it came equipped with 512 MB of DDR RAM running at 400 kHz, a 160 MB Ultra DMA hard disk with 7200 RPM, a DVD-R and CD-R combo, a DVD-ROM drive to let us make copies of our CDs or DVDs (for personal use, of course) and a 17-inch almost-flat HP m703 monitor.

Below the DVD-R/CD-R and CD-ROM drives there is a sliding door that reveals a seven-in-one memory device reader, a slot for an 3.5-inch floppy disk drive (which was not included), the three audio ports (for audio-in, audio-out and the headphones), two Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports and one FireWire port.

The FireWire port can be handy when we are transferring video from our video camera to the computer, or if we want to use a fast external hard disk to store the video data.

A smart design touch was the covered multi-storage bay on top of the front panel. We can store CDs or place our digital camera in it. A duct runs all the way from the drawer to the rear for USB and power cables, so that we will not have to put up with cable clutter.

This model has both a cordless keyboard and a cordless mouse. It has an application called Home Theater, which allows us to watch TV, play DVD movies, record TV programs, play music, etc. HP uses an ASUS tuner card for the TV feature.

We can also schedule the TV recording. The tuner came with its own remote control, too. Unlike the old Pavilion, which used Polk Audio speakers, the new model uses Harman/Kardon speakers.

First impression

The CPU of this Pavilion may look small, but I got a surprise when taking it out of the box. It was quite heavy. Setting up the entire system must be easy, as everything is clearly labeled and color-coded.

One good thing that I like is that we do not have to run a stereo cable from the tuner into the Audio-in jack of the sound card, which we would usually have to do when adding a TV tuner to our PC. The tuner was very well integrated into the system. I tested the Pavilion TV using a cheap indoor antenna, and the result was quite acceptable.

The power buttons on the monitor and the CPU glow in blue. The receiver and transmitter for the cordless keyboard and mouse also glows in blue when they are active. The speaker also has a blue indicator light. The blue theme looks quite attractive on the entire system.

When the system was powered up for the first time, it took the machine some time to configure the operating system, which was a Windows XP Home Edition.

Although getting inside the CPU housing is easy, you may have to rely on the USB 2.0 and FireWire connections for expansion. Out of the four expansion slots, one-perhaps two-are already occupied by the ATI Radeon graphics card, the 56Kbps modem and the TV tuner.

What do I think of it? The Pavilion t488d is an all-round home PC. For most home users, there is certainly more than enough horsepower under the hood. Like the old model that my wife used, every component works well with the others.

Do not expect truly blazing performance from this PC, because at the price it is offered -- around US$1,450 -- that would be too much to ask.

Speaking of price, we spent US$2,000 for the old 9850, and it gave us only a DVD drive and a CD-RW drives. Clearly, the prices of the Pavilion PCs have come down significantly since we bought ours, while their feature sets have been kept up to date.

HP has just launched the new generation of their PhotoSmart digital cameras in Indonesia. This Pavilion would be a good match for those cameras.

If you are not so much into tinkering and upgrading your machines, and you just want to have a good multimedia PC to manage your digital images, audio and video files, this model can be the ideal choice. You may want to invest in a better speaker set, though.