HP (Hewlett-Packard) Pavilion Media Center a1430n Desktop

Good Buy

Strengths: Fast Processor, Nice Media Tools, Good Gaming.

Weaknesses: Froze twice while multitasking, Lacking Video Editing.

Summary: I bought this computer from Circuit City for my 15 year old son. He mostly uses it for gaming and music/video editing. This computer supports most advanced games, although sometimes with the highest graphics settings the game will lag. Video editing is nice for a beginner, but lacks more advanced tools. It is hard to cut videos, as well as work with sound clips. The versions of the video editors are not full, and can be upgraded, but for an additional price. Most applications run smoothly, but it froze twice while listening to music and playing games at the same time. Among its strengths are: a good price, nice amount of RAM as well as a good processor. The 250 gigabyte hard drive is also useful. I had a problem with my modem because the driver installed was the wrong one, but after calling the support that problem was fixed. Their support was very good, and fixing my problem took about an hour. Overall this computer is a very good buy, and one of the best quality for the price on the market.

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Nice computer for the price

Strengths: Dual Core processor, lightscribe capabilitiy, dual layer burning, nice size hard drive.

Weaknesses: Coulb be bigger hard drive, start up our of box with upgrades causes glitch in startup of computer all icons dissapear

Summary: I bought this computer a coupld of weeks ago at a great price and am happy with it for the most part. It has all the things I wanted and a little more. I was looking to upgrade and this fit the bill witht he lightscribe, and dual layer burning and media center. I just got into learning about dual core and surpisingly this has that too. So all in all great features and I was able to pick mine up on sale for around $500. I have been using this on the safe mode setting of limited startup becuase when I try regular start up all the icons on the desktop dissapear and I cant do anything or run any programs. This is a problem I think with all the updates that the computer goes thru when setting up and updating programs. There is a fix to it that I saw on the hp webiste but have not had the time or the energy to do it yet . I am sure this will fix the problem and then I will have a great computer at a great price.

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Great Basic Computer

Strengths: Fast dual core processor. Lightscibe burner, larger hardrive, frontside ports, hp chat support is great, will upgrade to vista smoothly

Weaknesses: HP bloatware preinstalled, no recovery discs supplied, difficult to add internal drives, loud fan. ddr memory is more expensive than ddr2, media center pc but lacks tuner card/video inputs

Summary: I have had this wonderful computer for a year now and have been pretty happy. I bought it when I realized that I upgrading my dell's memory would be extremely pricey due to the rdram they used. I figured that rather than spend the money on an upgrade I would look for something that suited my needs and was somewhat expandable.

I shopped around and found this at best buy for a cheap price and then had circuit city price match the best buy add and with the hp rebates (not available if purchased at best buy) I was able to get it for about 600. I didn't bother with a monitor or anything else.

I have had this a year and have been happy with it. I have used it for gaming but it has an integrated video card so it doesn't handle the higher end games very well.

Mainly I now use it for the home/office related uses and video production. It holds up pretty well and the 250 GB hard drive leaves lots of room to play with. I also installed vista home premium this last week. I upgraded the memory to 3 GB by adding two sticks and Vista is doing well.

It is billed as a media center pc but lacks features such as a tv tuner and video outs (other than the vga) I was also disappointed that there is no video in other than the firewire or usb 2.0 inputs.

One last note. I initially had some issues with running a few video production programs on this pc. I installed adobe premier elements right after buying it and would get a blue screen 100% of the time when running this program. I figured it was a driver conflict but couldn't track it down. I returned adobe to the company (they were real good about taking the return) and got Sony Vegas.

At that point I became determined to install a legitamate clean copy of xp without the bloated preinstall that HP supplies so I tracked down a system builders copy of xp from a local repair shop.

I installed xp via this disc and used the license activation code from the sticker on the side of the computer to register and activate the copy of xp. After that I had just a few driver problems to fix after and I had myself a clean install.

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Great computer and a Great Deal

Strengths: Fast cpu, lots of bells and whistles.

Weaknesses: Not enough expansion bays.

Summary: I immediately added a new graphics card to run drafting software. I had trouble finding room to fit three extra drives (CD, 3.5, and Harddive). Otherwise this is a great computer, came bundled with 17" Monitor and color printer.

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