HP Pavilion ze4365us Notebook PC (1.80-GHz Athlon XP-M 2200+, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

I bought this unit so I could run Architectural Desktop 2004 (A CAD software package), and so I could play games in my spare time. It achieves both of these quite well. ADT 2004 is quite a hog, but still runs very well. I have played Grand Theft Auto - Vice City, Links 2003 and Nascar 2003. They all played very well. I had some problems with Links 2003, but I updated it and now it seems to work ok.

CD burner seems to be pretty fast, DVD drive works great, and music ripping is also very fast. No complaints here.

The touchpad is kind of wierd, but works well when you can't use a mouse. The keyboard feels nice, even though the keys are a little stiff.

The 15" screen is very nice! Very clear & crisp.

The hard drive is fairly fast, and pretty quiet.

Wireless ethernet works well with a D-Link 604+, and the standard ethernet port is very fast.

I replaced the XP Home with XP Pro, no problems there.

Battery lasts around 2 hours for me, depending on the tasks. Haven't tried playing a DVD for the life of the battery yet.

It seems rather heavy, but I don't have experience here. With a nice bag that has a shoulder strap, it isn't so bad.

In summary, I would buy another one, and would also consider using it as a desktop with additional keyboard, mouse and possibly external screen.

I would give it 5 stars, but I haven't dealt with tech support yet. Besides, nothing's perfect!

****
Good keyboard layout. Has CTRL and ALT keys on each side of the keyboard (not symmetrical though). The power button is very close to the escape key, VI users beware.

**
Heat. The fan is a little loud for my liking, but hey, what do you want, from a fast computer? The bios seems to have no provision for under-clocking, which would sure be a nice feature. The cold air intake is in a poor location as well. It is on the bottom and easily blocked if you set the notebook on a soft or uneven surface. It runs hot enough that you'll want to set it on something other than your lap anyway.

***
Short battery life. Again, with this much computing power you can't ask for much more. It doesn't seem to last much over an hour for continuous use. I'd be surprised if you could watch a full DVD on the battery.

*****
Software bundle. Ships with Win XP (yuck) taking up the whole 40G partition. Thankfully, HP included a real Win XP install disk, in addition to the normal rescue disks. The disk will install to a more appropriate sized partition, making room for an alternative opeating system or a more thoughtful partitioning scheme. They also included a cd version of Roxio and a DVD program I haven't used. Kudos to HP for giving me a way to avoid having to resize a NTFS partition.

*****

Wireless. The included Orinoco PCI wireless ethernet was easy to set up and use.

*****
Display. I really like the display! It's large and does not cause eye strain. I have had problems with other laptops over this in the past.

****
Firewire. The single Firewire (ieee1394) port is a mini. Cables are a little harder to find and more expensive.

Other notes. It doesn't have a floppy drive. Red Hat 9 loaded the wrong keyboard which halted my install process. I didn't mess with trying to find the correct argument to pass to the kernel. Mandrake 9.1 had no such problem, and I've wanted to try it anyhow. PCMCIA caused my boot to hang under Mandrake 9.1. I just turned it off because I have no need for it. I haven't tried to set up the modem either. The volume controls don't respond well with either OS. I much prefer the traditional wheel for volume.