HP Pavilion zv5169EA

There's something reassuring about HP notebooks, and this stylish Pavilion is no exception, being aimed squarely at the home user looking for a well-rounded machine at a good price.

Weighing 3.6kg, you'll certainly feel the Pavilion in your bag. This is a shame, as the three-hour light-use battery life means it's capable of being carried around for quite a while before shutting down; it includes AMD's PowerNow! technology to drop the processor speed down, and HP implements it more successfully than Systemax: the Pavilion doesn't get so hot and the fan only kicks in when you're pushing the system.

The Pavilion's size allows plenty of ports to grace its sides, with three USB 2, parallel, mini-FireWire, 56K modem, 10/100 Ethernet, S-Video and VGA connectors. The notebook's bulk also allows for a set of Harman/Kardon speakers at the front; they're no match for separate speakers, but they still pack enough punch to make watching DVDs a pleasure.

The 15in widescreen TFT also helps here, as its WSXGA resolution (1,280 x 800) and smooth, colour-accurate playback are among the best we've seen. Text is also crystal clear, and the wide aspect means you can have two documents open at the same time.

It's not all play for the zv5169EA, as it's a perfectly competent workhorse too. The core components mean it's no slouch when it comes to office tasks and even most multimedia applications. Its score of 1.58 is a little low for the Athlon 64 3000+ chip that's inside though - the Systemax was 10 per cent faster.

The 40GB hard disk offers a fair amount of storage space, though we'd prefer 60GB at this price, and the DVD writer and multimedia card readers will also let you export data. The keyboard is decent too, with large, well-arranged keys that provide good travel. The touchpad is excellent, and HP includes a button to deactivate the touchpad when you're typing.

Unlike most other budget notebooks, HP makes an effort to provide some 3D grunt by including nVidia's GeForce4 Go 440 with 64MB of memory. This still couldn't provide playable frame rates in our Unreal Tournament 2004 and Halo benchmarks, but it will cope with last year's games easily enough.

The lack of wireless is the big problem, and nearly inexcusable these days. However, you could easily slip one into the PC Card slot, and the fact that this is an Athlon 64 notebook for £850 means you're getting plenty of power for the money.

The only problem for HP is Systemax's TourBook 4107, which offers nearly six hours of battery life in a 2.9kg form. It also provides 802.11g wireless as standard. But if portability and wireless aren't important to you, spend an extra £51 on the Pavilion.

Author: Mark Walsh