HP Notebook w/Athlon XP 2500+ for $699 at Circuit City

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Circuit City has the:

HP Pavilion Notebook PC with AMD Athlon™ XP Processor 2500+ (http://www.circuitcity.com/detail.jsp?c=1&b=g&catoid=-8026&qp=0092232053403&oid=85895)

http://www.circuitcity.com/IMAGE/product/hires/hp/CHP.PC.HP.ZE4610US.jpg

For sale at $1,149.99 - $200.00 Instant Rebate - $150.00 MIR (http://www.circuitcity.com/cs_contentdisplay.jsp?c=1&b=g&incat=88781) - $100 MIR (http://www.circuitcity.com/rebatedetail.jsp?c=1&b=g&oid=85895&catoid=-8026) = $699.99

Athlon XP 2500+, 256Mb PC-2100, 40Gb HD, DVD/CD-RW, 15" XGA, Radeon Mobility, 56k, NIC and more.

Great deal for the price, if any PPRuNers are currently in the U.S. or have friends in the U.S., this is a great performing computer for the price.

Take Care,

Richard

[seacue]

Richard,

I read the specs and reviews and note two "issues".

1) The USB ports are 1.1 .

2) Apparently it won't read DVD+RW discs. Reads DVD+R discs. Reads/writes CD+RW OK.

What is your view of the lack of USB 2.0?

The DVD issue is of less importance to me.

As a bad joke, apparently the units manufactured before October 2003 come with the Blaster worm factory-installed!!

Thanks,

sc

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

seacue,

For the price it is a good deal. Personally I would not mind USB 2.0, Firewire, WiFi, Floppy Drive, 512Mb of RAM, etc. but I do not think they are critical in a "toss in your flightbag" computer to take on trips with you. You might want to add a WiFi card to the computer so you could access the net on a wireless network. With USB 1.1 you can get by in a pinch, but you can always use the 100baseT NIC or the CD-RW to remove large amounts of data from the computer that you would not want to run over the slower USB Port.

The pluses for it is the 15" screen and the mobile 2500+, (which makes it one of the fastest of the sub $1,000.00 notebooks on the market).

If you wanted a notebook that is a desktop replacement, then the eMachines Notebook w/Athlon 64 3000+ (http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=119787) is the way to go. That notebook packs everything you could ever want in a notebook and with performance to spare for the future.

Take Care,

Richard

[Wing Commander Fowler]

Hi Richard,

thanx for the tip off - yes this looks like a very good offer indeed! Have been monitoring the DELL USA website for a few weeks now to check what's on offer there and they've had a few very good budget machines on offer for around the $699 mark after rebate but all celeron 2.4 processors. Yours here seems better for sure.

Couple of questions for you

How do you go about getting the rebate if you are non US resident

Have a five year old HP Pavillion and the screen never compared to the DELL/IBM/Compaq machines of it's day - have they improved?

On the machine offered here can't make out if they are saying both the RAM bays are filled as I'd want to ramp it up to 512Mb.

Yr help appreciated as ever.

:ok:

[seacue]

Thanks to Richard, I done done it ... as they say.

CompUSA had a special on the hp4630 as well as the 4610. I chose the 4630 for 20+ % more money since is has 512 Mby of Ram instead of 256, and has an inbuilt 802.11b/g wireless.

It's still in the box. More later ;-)

BTW, the CompUSA special runs out at end-of-business tomorrow, 21 February.

Thanks again for alerting me,

sc

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

seacue,

Let us know how it works out. I hope you enjoy the new notebook. :ok:

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. Wing Commander Fowler, the HP Screens have improved greatly from the screens used 5 years ago. For the rebates, you just have to use a U.S. Address to get them. (There are ways to do that.) ;)