Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
Usually I do all my work on laptops; Sony Vaio's, Dell Inspiron's, IBM Think Pad's but I recently decided to upgrade a 11 year old desktop to do web server pre-hosting plus some corporate video rendering for new DMV traffic school requirements for our traffic school, Internet Traffic School.com. Not being a computer builder, I wanted something that was 64 bit and that had a lot of available programs. I wanted to go Linux but programs are hard to find and I won't buy an Apple anything any more because they always abandon previous customers and I was burned over and over in the past with useless hardware and software. I also wanted something with at least 16 GB of memory so it wouldn't be obsolete in the next 5 years and 3.0 Ghz or more. I looked at Dell which was too expensive. We could easily afford it but since we were only going to be keeping this purchase for a short time, I wasn't going to overpay. Then we looked at Lenovo but they did not have a dual monitor capability that I was looking for so we could be rendering video on one monitor while working on company work on the other. The similar Gateway model that was around the $1,000 price range was a possibility but it had a cheap build look and our database engineer who is a computer genius said he gets people all the time at his consulting company who have Gateway computers that have just failed so he said under no circumstances buy a Gateway for company use. The Lenovo was a fine computer, solid build, plenty of memory, Windows 7 but no dual monitor outlets. It was also a quad Intel processor that is great actually and in most tests faster than the 6-core AMD. But after researching and spec comparing we decided to go with this HP six core, 3.3 Ghz, 10 GB memory because it had dual monitor capacity, blue ray video, and other benefits that no other computer had in this range. The negatives about this computer is common to all similar computers, none are flawless. Some have 8 GB limits on memory. Others no blue ray. Etc ... This computer has a slow hard drive of only 5400 and the thru rate of data is often slow due to bottlenecking issues within the motherboard design. But we can upgrade later to a 7200 speed master drive if we need to for less than $75.00. Also the power supply is marginal at 350 but no other computers that we looked at were any better. So if things get to the point where we need to we can always upgrade the power supply too for around $75.00. So all in all, we got a pretty good deal for $979 with no sales tax. I am not a gamer but need video rendering and with the new 64 bit rendering program that we are buying to take advantage of the 4 GB limit on 32 bit operating systems we should see a dramatic decrerase in render time saving us employee hours and freeing up our media staff to create other in-house projects faster. It is a good looking computer with all the current bells and whistles plus HP is an awesome company, they stand behind their products and have a fine reputation. If this computer works out, then we will be buying them for everyone in the company because these computers all have wireless cards so we can all network on our corporate network as well as on our google documents/gmail/buzz interactive collaborations. Terry Haggin [...]

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