HP Pavilion zd7050ea

When it comes to 17in notebooks, Apple remains king; its PowerBook G4 is the slickest, lightest model around. But choosing the PowerBook not only means abandoning Windows, it also means stretching to £2,200. This mammoth Pavilion, HP's first 17in notebook, offers the reassurance of a big name with a far more affordable price.

The Pavilion is stylish for a Windows notebook, with a grey-silver exterior and black insides, and is very sturdy. It still can't rival Apple for weight, but it comes with numerous features that make it more than worthy of consideration.

First and foremost is the whopping 17in widescreen TFT, with the 1,365 x 768 resolution meaning that text shows up crystal clear regardless of how small the point size. It's ideal for users with less than 20-20 vision, although a larger resolution would have been better for anyone wanting to run two programs side by side. Horizontal viewing angles are also good, although the vertical left a little to be desired.

Being a widescreen laptop, the zd7050ea is also a good choice for playing DVDs. On the whole, the experience was excellent: playback was smooth with colours accurately reproduced. The good-quality Harman Kardon speakers also help to make this machine more than just a spreadsheet king.

Some of the credit for the playback quality goes to the heavyweight graphics chip, nVidia's GeForce FX Go5600, with 64MB of dedicated memory. It may not be the fastest chip around - ATi's Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro currently holds that crown - but it's still more than capable of handling most games, as the Pavilion's 10,285 score in 3DMark2001 SE (XGA, 32-bit colour depth) indicates.

The quality of internal components doesn't stop there. The combination of a 2.8GHz desktop Pentium 4C, coupled with 512MB of DDR memory, gave a surprisingly low score of 1.05 in our real-world tests. However, we found it a nippy performer in general use and it was particularly good at tasks that need a high frequency, such as video compression. Overall, though, it falls behind the Advent 7039 (see p57), which is powered by a Mobile Athlon 64.

Using a desktop chip inside a notebook chassis can often mean that it gets very hot, very quickly. However, thanks partly to its size, we found no real heat problems with this Pavilion - then again, you wouldn't want to have this 4.2kg beast on your lap for long anyway. And with a battery life of just three hours, four minutes under light use, it's clear that HP didn't design it for travel away from a power supply for long. HP doesn't ignore the benefits of wireless networking, though, with an 802.11g mini-PCI card fitted - this promises a theoretical maximum speed of 54Mb/sec as opposed to the more traditional 11Mb/sec of 802.11b.

Storage, both internal and external, is well catered for thanks to a 60GB hard disk and a DVD burner that can write to DVD+R and DVD+RW discs. You could also transfer data using the card reader slot that takes Memory Stick, SD, MMC and SmartMedia cards, or by slotting a thumbdrive into one of the four USB slots. HP also bundles its USB Digital Drive; this slots into a normal USB port and allows you to transfer your files to and from an SD card. Other ports on the Pavilion's impressive list include parallel, serial and two Type II PC Card slots. A mini-FireWire, S-Video, modem and 10/100 Ethernet ports round off the package.

The overall size of the Pavilion also allows for extra features such as a numerical keypad that sits next to the full-sized keyboard. The numerical keypad obviously lends itself to spreadsheets and other number-based activities, but more importantly, the keyboard itself is excellent. Keys are large and well positioned, simulating a desktop keyboard rather nicely. The buttons have a good feel to them and have a satisfying bounce when typed on.