HP Media Center Computer - Page 2

Since it's really designed more for the family room/home theatre than it is an office, it also comes with a remote control to use with the Media Center features. One last piece of optional equipment that you can order separately is an HP Personal Media Drive, which fits into a slot on the left front of the computer. You would need that if you manage to fill up the 180 gigabyte hard drive that comes with the computer. (It's actually a 200 GB drive, but 20 GB is used for all the recovery software that you would use to restore your system after Windows XP inevitably melts down.)

It's got a DVD RW drive for writing your own audio and video disks, plus a DVD/ CD ROM. To play back all the video, there is an ATI RADEON X300 SE PCI-E graphics card with 128MB DDR video memory and TV out. I'm not a cutting-edge gamer, by any means, so I haven't really pushed the video card that way. However, playing back a DVD gave a remarkable sharp picture. Oh yeah, it's got an Intel Pentium 4 3.00Ghz CPU. (I actually look at RAM size and the graphics card as the first measure of speed, with the CPU second.)

So far, it's been used mostly as a regular office PC. The only complaint I have with it is the DVD/CD drive seems to take a little longer to get going than I'm used to, probably because there's so much software (Windows Media Center, HP Tunes, iTunes, WinDVD) all trying to decide who gets first crack at the disk. The keyboard also has special keys that are supposed to take me right to my favorite web sites, but the programming for those keys seems to be rather finicky. It also "only" has 512 MB of RAM, which I will probably upgrade soon. But with the heavily discounted and rebated price (a little more than $900 for me) I could trim away a lot of the media features and still come up with a good computer for the price. If you are going to shop, note that this model is being phased out by HP in favor of the 1270 (and probably the 1370 and 1470 too). But your best bargains are always going to be in last year's computer.

Article Author: Bruce Kratofil

Bruce Kratofil blogs on bugs and other things that can go wrong with your computer at The BugBlog, and writes about computers and economics at BJK Research

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