HP Pavilion zd7000 Review

• Product: HP Pavilion zd7000


• Price: $2,618 list


• Specs: 3.2-GHz Pentium 4, 512MB DDR SDRAM, 60GB hard drive, DVD+RW drive, four USB 2.0 and one FireWire port, 17-inch WXGA display, 802.11g, 9.3 lbs. weight(include Hp pavilion zd7000 battery)2000g


• Company Info: 800-752-0900, www.hp.com

Not only did HP design its desktop replacement notebook in true desktop style—with a 3.2-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, a 17-inch LCD, and a weight of 9.3 pounds—but it also kept multimedia in mind.

The HP Pavilion zd7000, our Editors' Choice, came in first on our multimedia tests and on 3DMark03, undoubtedly thanks to its nVidia GeForce FX Go 5600 card with 128MB of local graphics memory. (All the other systems here had 64MB of graphics memory.)

The notebook's 17-inch wide-screen LCD is a plus for watching movies or editing photos or video. And the DVD drive lets you burn your home movies. Just be sure to do all this while plugged in; the hp pavilion zd7000 battery life won't let you compute for long untethered.

Music:

You can rip your albums to the hard drive and burn MP3 files to standard audio CDs. MusicMatch Jukebox creates and stores playlists of your favorite music. The built-in Harman Kardon speakers make for a pleasant listening experience.

Photos:

Imaging enthusiasts will really like HP Image Zone. Though not as advanced as some titles, Image Zone has the common functions most users need, like the ability to crop photos and adjust for brightness and color correction. Photo albums intuitively organize picture collections.

Video:

Creating DVD videos from family movies is a snap. The DVD drive, a FireWire port, and Roxio's Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 make it easy to capture and render footage to DVD– recordable media. But the 60GB hard drive will fill up fast.

Gaming:

Equipped with an nVidia GeForce FX Go 5600 graphics adapter with 128MB of memory, as well as a wide screen, this is the best notebook we saw for gaming—and the 3DMark03 score proves our point.

Battery life of HP Pavilion zd7000:

The HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE pays the price for its impressive mobile performance with lackluster laptop hp pavilion zd 7000 battery life that puts it in a distant last place in our group of desktop replacements. Although the HP Pavilion zd7000 P4EE includes a huge 14.8V, 6,600mAh (98WHr) hp zd7000 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)hp pavilion zd7000 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 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.

Reviewed by digital camera battery.