Hp pavilion zd7000 laptop and laptop battery review

hp pavilion zd7000 laptop and battery

Laptops are ready to take over the world -- the world of desktops, that is. Sleek, stylish and powerful, today's crop of laptop computers are priced more reasonably and can do more than ever before. The nominees in this year's Datamation Laptop Product of the Year Awards are all worthy of taking the place of a desktop model.

"Now, notebooks are delivering desktop-level performance at ever-falling price points," says Alan Promisel, research analyst, client computing for International Data Corp., a market research firm in Framingham, Mass.

This category's winner, the Hewlett-Packard Co. Pavilion zd7000 boasts a generous 17-inch screen along with a cranking 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, 60GB hard drive and a built-in DVD-RW drive. And at a street price of a bit less than $1,500, the Pavilion zd7000 is priced right.

"The fast processor easily enables multitasking," says Chris Nerney, executive editor of JupiterWeb's IT Management channels and owner of a Pavilion zd7000. "And the wider screen is ideal for spreadsheet work. You can see more columns than with most notebooks without having to shrink the spreadsheet."

Features of HP Pavilion zd7000

HP stocked the Pavilion zd7000 with features on the outside and muscle on the inside. Along the edges, it has a quartet of USB 2.0 ports; a four-pin FireWire port; S-Video; two flash memory slots that read Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick, and SmartMedia; and a Type II/Type III PC Card slot. A fixed DVD-R/RW drive accommodates most optical media but, unfortunately, not a backup battery. Inside, there's a screaming-hot 3.2GHz desktop Pentium 4 (it really does run hot; good thing the Pavilion zd7000 is too heavy to park on your lap for long); Nvidia's AGP 8X GeForce FX Go5600 graphics controller with 128MB of its own memory; 512MB of 333MHz memory filling both memory slots; and a 60GB hard drive.

Microsoft streamlined and extended Media Center Edition (MCE) 2004 in some useful ways. The basic idea is a separate, no-keyboard interface that lets you use the remote to run utilities for viewing and recording television, organizing and displaying photos, and performing other media-oriented activities. MCE 2004 can teach itself how to work with your set-top box, walk you through calibrating color on your screen, and notify you when someone is trying to call you (if you have Caller ID). It can download current TV schedules unattended and record a TV show while you're using the system for other tasks. Microsoft also improved the television listings; you now have tools to sort and filter them, and you can find listings based on keywords

Performance of HP Pavilion zd7000

The HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE comes in first place in mobile performance in this small test group of desktop replacements. The HP Pavilion zd7000 is the first laptop we've tested with Intel's Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor. The difference between this chip and the normal Pentium 4 is the addition of a 2MB L3 memory cache on the Extreme Edition chip as well as its normal 512K L2 memory cache. The HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE's mobile performance score has less to do with this major bump in cache memory and more to do with how low the speed of the processor is throttled in order to conserve battery life. In this case, the HP Pavilion zd7000's 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor does not drop its speed significantly and as a result ends up with the highest MobileMark performance score we've yet seen. Unfortunately, the HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE's great mobile performance does not come without a price, as is seen in its battery life score. The Dell Inspiron XPS with its Pentium 4 3.4GHz processor is a distant second in mobile performance, with the original HP Pavilion zd7000 P4 bringing up the rear. Often with desktop replacements, mobile performance comes down to how much battery life the manufacturer is comfortable sacrificing. In the case of the HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE, HP chooses mobile performance, designing a system that can run office and content-creation applications very fast in a mobile state.

Battery of hp pavilion zd7000 laptop

The HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE pays the price for its impressive mobile performance with lackluster battery life that puts it in a distant last place in our group of desktop replacements. Although the HP 338794-001 includes a huge 14.8V, 6,600mAh (98WHr) battery, the battery is drained in less than two hours. This is a result of its CPU running at a relatively high speed, as evidenced by its great mobile performance. The Dell Inspiron XPS which includes a Pentium 4-3.4GHz processor, came in first place in battery life. Since the Dell Inspiron XPS's 14.8V, 6,400mAh (95WHr) battery has specs similar to the HP Pavilion zd7000's battery, this difference in battery life can most likely be attributed to the Dell Inspiron XPS's throttling of its fast processor down to a level below the HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE's. As the mobile performance results indicate, the Dell Inspiron XPS is less concerned with mobile performance and more with battery life. The older HP Pavilion zd7000 P4 with its 14.8V, 6,450mAh (95WHr) came in a very close second place behind the Dell Inspiron XPS. The HP Pavilion zd7000 P4 (battery code pp2182d) was the worst mobile performer of this lot, falling about 4 percent behind the Dell Inspiron XPS. Basically, the vanilla zd7000 P4 system uses less juice to power its CPU than the HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE does. Consequently, the HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE has battery life that fails to inspire, but having said that, battery life is probably the least important aspect of a desktop replacement, since most users will be using it while it's plugged in.