HP Pavilion Evaluation @ [H] Consumer

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Chris_Morley

Former [H] Consumer Managing Ed.
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Check it out!
For HP's first evaluation with us, we look at one of our systems from our Retail Purchasing experiment. This bargain system from HP represents one of the best bang-for-the-buck purchases that we've made so far, but at what expense to the customer experience?
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Gaming Ability 7.0/10.0???
I understand when a system is not ment for gaming, that the score may get a buffer....
But this makes cross computer comparisons hard.

They sure did install a lot of bloatware on the computer though, that's for sure!

Same complaints for the tech support. If a tech support "professional" told me I could do a destructive reinstall and not loose my data....... and I took his word on it....... and the exact opposite happened......... I would be Ticked off. 7 out of 10 seems too high on my strict scale of how tech support should operate.
Another thing (which im not sure if you took into account with tech support), is this is the main tech support for HP. So, even though you had a cheap computer, and the tech support for such a cheap computer may be "ok", what would happen if you bought a nice little 3000$ computer from HP? Would the same level of tech support yield the same value (7 out of 10)?

Thanks for the time you took with this though. It's always interesting to see how each company works. (Good thing you didn't buy a 3000$ computer from them with the same tech support...... that would be a let down).
 
While tech support was largely unhelpful in troubleshooting, they were responsive, always there, cordial, and at admittedly thorough. And when it came down to it the RMA process worked, and the drive showed up quickly. So if you look at just one aspect, sure, it would have scored lower.

As to gaming, the added ram and fast processor made it a better solution than the eMachines T3418, and the fact that it was able to take advantage of an expansion card also played into the final score. As is, however, it definitely was a sup-par solution.
 
I don't think rebates should be factored into the Value category as not all rebates are available in all areas of the country.

I do have to agree with a previous post, that gaming score is too high. If you have to put a video card into it then I don't see how you even pass a score of 5 (besides the e-machines has a better integrated solution and was scoring very similar scores to this machine)
 
It was primarily Fry's heavily discounted price - only $50 was offered as a mail in rebate. The fact is that Fry's continually has many models on closeout that anyone can purchase.

As to gaming - we can't deny that we were able to install and play two of the most popular mainstream titles, and the fact that we were able to upgrade the machine was a huge bonus. As it stands, the low framerates with the integrated solution made it a "sub par" out of box solution for gaming - but all games installed just fine and ran without a hitch.
 
Chris - have you guys ever thought about creating different review categories? Because your reviewers apply different evaluating criteria to each system given the context, you wind up with some confusing scores. A 7 for gaming on this HP is not as meaningful as an 8 for gaming from a boutique (for example). Why not have a category for value PCs or PCs to recommend to your non-technically inclined friends and family along with enthusiast or gaming or whatever other categories? By doing this, you would save yourselves a lot of time defending scoring on the forum and make your reviews a little easier to read and contextualize.
 
lovemyPC said:
Chris - have you guys ever thought about creating different review categories? Because your reviewers apply different evaluating criteria to each system given the context, you wind up with some confusing scores. A 7 for gaming on this HP is not as meaningful as an 8 for gaming from a boutique (for example). Why not have a category for value PCs or PCs to recommend to your non-technically inclined friends and family along with enthusiast or gaming or whatever other categories? By doing this, you would save yourselves a lot of time defending scoring on the forum and make your reviews a little easier to read and contextualize.
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We spend a considerable amount of time explaining our rational in the articles. This article was over 10,000 words. Furthermore, if people do not agree with our scoring they are free to draw their own conclusions - we just try to be as fair and concise as possible.

I appreciate y'all's feedback and will continue to make these articles as useful as possible.
 
While the a1330n was available at my Best Buy a whole lot of people purchased them.
I worked as a member of the Geek Squad from 9/05 to 4/06 and I am very familar with the computer and all the unecassary crap on it.
 
The big difference there was that the bloatware on the Dell impeded its performance and software stability. We did not see this with the HP.
 
jon67 said:
Dell was flogged for intentionally installing bloatware on their system, HP got away with merely a scratch for the same practice.
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We did not purchase a $1300+ gaming PC from HP. And, like Gateway, the added software did not impede our experience.

I have explained this to you over and over, yet you seem to want to continue this discussion to continually harp on us for our scoring decisions.

I consider this matter closed.
 
Chris_Morley said:
It was primarily Fry's heavily discounted price - only $50 was offered as a mail in rebate. The fact is that Fry's continually has many models on closeout that anyone can purchase.
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When Fry's is available locally across the majority of the states then it would be a valid source to consider, as they are not I don't consider their in house discounts truly valid. Look, the deal would have not been so good if you had to ship it.

I think any true value should consider shipping if the retailer in question does not have stores in a majority of the markets. If not, you could just review local computer store offerings and get the same effect.


Considering the specs of that HP versus the Pavillion it speaks words to the ability of the NVidia integrated chipset compared to the ATI set.
 
Chris_Morley said:
We spend a considerable amount of time explaining our rational in the articles. This article was over 10,000 words. Furthermore, if people do not agree with our scoring they are free to draw their own conclusions - we just try to be as fair and concise as possible.

I appreciate y'all's feedback and will continue to make these articles as useful as possible.
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I appreciate you're ([H] staff) thoroughness. I have to say that I put little weight in the final scores. By the time I reach the conclusion I know about how well each system is going to do just by the context of the article.

I think that some of these complainers are skipping directly to the final scores and then questioning your logic without weighing it on the content of your article. What a shame! This is some good writing, do not skip to the end! :(
 
Thanks for your comments, Joe.

Indeed, that is what we like to do: Lay out the facts, give you our impressions. But at the end of the day, you're the one that makes the final choice in the matter. Do you recommend this system or not? We give you our best analysis, but if one thing is more important to you than others, whatever system we're talking about may have a different value attached to it.

Thanks for "getting it." :)
 
Shivetya said:
When Fry's is available locally across the majority of the states then it would be a valid source to consider, as they are not I don't consider their in house discounts truly valid. Look, the deal would have not been so good if you had to ship it.

I think any true value should consider shipping if the retailer in question does not have stores in a majority of the markets. If not, you could just review local computer store offerings and get the same effect.


Considering the specs of that HP versus the Pavillion it speaks words to the ability of the NVidia integrated chipset compared to the ATI set.
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Fair enough. I hope that the meat of the evaluation was clear enough for you to make an informed opinion about the system, however you feel about it.
 
Good review on a system that seems to be a good value. A few things I would recomend doing.

Unless I missed it you did talk about replacing the psu but did you check to make sure a replacement would fit? HP for the most part doesn't do anything too weird but I know dell in the past would have a power supply that looked normal yet would not take a normal unit for some small reason or another.

Also with these systems that don't come with cds it would be nice to see the experience in ordering cds for them from the vendor. Many times with hp you can get an os disk and then a recovery set for the software. I just think the ability to get the disks and the price on them would be good to know. Also touching on options for making recovery disks would be good. Many have programs to make the disks. Hell I think emachine use to come with blank cds to make them with.

Overall I really liked how you touched on the upgrades through the web site. It seemed like hp had fair pricing on them which is nice compaired to vendors that love to hide margin in upgrades(dell)
 
swatbat said:
Unless I missed it you did talk about replacing the psu but did you check to make sure a replacement would fit? HP for the most part doesn't do anything too weird but I know dell in the past would have a power supply that looked normal yet would not take a normal unit for some small reason or another.

Also with these systems that don't come with cds it would be nice to see the experience in ordering cds for them from the vendor. Many times with hp you can get an os disk and then a recovery set for the software. I just think the ability to get the disks and the price on them would be good to know. Also touching on options for making recovery disks would be good. Many have programs to make the disks. Hell I think emachine use to come with blank cds to make them with.
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It looks like this chassis would take a normal power supply from the mounting screw layout. We still have the machine in the office, so I'll take another look at it, but I don't think that's an issue.

I believe I mentioned somewhere that HP has a dedicated utility for making recovery disks. The disk that we received with our system was a CD-R. Really, our biggest issue with the recovery system, however one accomplishes it, is that we're unable to escape the bloatware unless we have a retail OS, which was not provided. Contacting HP to request an OS copy or recovery solution would have been an interesting venture - we'll see if we can include that if we come across this situation again.
 
swatbat said:
Unless I missed it you did talk about replacing the psu but did you check to make sure a replacement would fit? HP for the most part doesn't do anything too weird but I know dell in the past would have a power supply that looked normal yet would not take a normal unit for some small reason or another.
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The chassis will take any standard ATX PSU with minimal modification. I have the same case with a Silverstone ST60F. I just had to snip off an extra PSU retention hole(was overlapping the power connector). Took about 10 seconds.

The one I snipped off is the one not being used in the bottom right of this picture: http://consumer.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTE0ODE3MTAwMVN2TFU5cVoyNWVfNF82X2wuanBn
 
DNA Doc said:
It looks like this chassis would take a normal power supply from the mounting screw layout. We still have the machine in the office, so I'll take another look at it, but I don't think that's an issue.

I believe I mentioned somewhere that HP has a dedicated utility for making recovery disks. The disk that we received with our system was a CD-R. Really, our biggest issue with the recovery system, however one accomplishes it, is that we're unable to escape the bloatware unless we have a retail OS, which was not provided. Contacting HP to request an OS copy or recovery solution would have been an interesting venture - we'll see if we can include that if we come across this situation again.
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The reason I asked about the recovery disks is I use to work as an hp tech and at least the disks we had that hp shipped us were use the hp xp home/pro disk and then we would have a set of software recovery disks for that model(s). Most of the newer machines were restored this way. I was under the impression that you can get the same disks from hp which should be interesting. As far as the power supply yea it looks like it should fit with little to no effort. The reason I asked was if you look at hp's power supply and a normal on you will see hp's have the power plug flat with the back of the psu. Many aftermarket have it sticking out some with plasitc on the sides. I've seen some hp cases not want to take a normal psu because they had something blocking it. Mind you it is a quick fix but something always worth looking into.
 
No too long ago I picked up a Presario laptop from fry's for $799. Turion 64, 512 ram, 100gb hard drive. DVD RW (but not lightscribe). The laptop has run great, in fact I'm also dual booting from XP Home to the early may Vista build. Yesterday though, my dvd's starting skipping. I had noticed that as I pushed eject and the tray popped out, I could feel it sticking along the tracks instead of sliding smoothly. Now, my 1 complaint about this notebook is that the bottom is thin plastic, so you can feel it bend when you pick it up, especially around the edges. So, I think DVD got stressed and it's a hardware failure.

I call HP and prepare for the dreaded click here do this trouble shooting. As I connect to the support tech (definately foreign), I explain right away that I think it's a hardware issue, I build my own pc's blah blah blah. So..... he has me go to device manager, uninstall the dvd and uninstall the secondary IDE driver..... knowing that I have to go through this bs to get an RMA....

I reboot.... lo and behold, the damn thing is fixed and no more skipping. In fact, I was the one with the skipping voice, as I stammered out my thanks for fixing it.....

I know a lot of trouble shooting is rote from a list but damn if it didn't work great this time.

On a quick aside, I purchased a media PC about 9 months ago and at that time I could choose nvidia or Ati, so it runs a 6600. It's also the Amberine motherboard and I can tell you that you can easily upgrade the processor to dual core as well. While it came with a 3200, it's now running a 3500 dual core. The darn BIOS won't let me disable bios or video shadowing though... probably my only gripe about it. Oh yeah, not only is there a lot of crap installed by default, but if you look in add / remove programs, I swear there are 3 different hp printer driver listings, most of the them over 60 megs probably covering every hp printer ever made. Love that uninstall :)

For being my first store bought systems ( I wanted easy media center), I'm pleasantly surprised by HP and their support. I know I know, I should hang out on the OEM section too. Been meaning too, but it took until this article to galvanize me to register and post.

I know it's rambling but thanks for reading.
 
HP has the best customer service I know of in the OEM PC business. The trick is to call later in the evening and get a native english speaker from either their Canada or US offices (I asked one of the Canadian guys about how it works, and he said there are a bunch of offices all over the place and you randomly get forwarded to one). I had a HDD on the fritz, so I needed a replacement, HPs software came up w/ no problem, but Maxtor's did. The indian I got the first time told me it was not the drive (I knew it was), I didn't argue, and hung up. Called again later in the evening, got a Canadian guy, I told him the problem, and a new HDD was on my doorstep the next day. I've had a few experiences with them, all great. HP/Compaq is the only OEM I'd ever consider for myself or my family.
 
Thanks for the eval, it reinforced my decision to buy HP. I have been building my own systems for many years, but the price and features on the a1450n (x2 4200, 2 gig ram, 250 HD, etc) couldn't be matched. I replaced the power supply with an ANTEC 450 and the video with eVGA KO 7900gt and the system is running flawlessly. Scored 4740 on 3DMark06 even with the bloatware still present. No problems with any games I presently own. Seems like HP has come a long way since I last had dealings with them. :D
 
I believe that all of it can be removed through the Control Panel.
 
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