Is This New $428 HP Pavilion Laptop Worth It?
Posted on 20. Jul, 2011 by MikeP in Guides & Tips, Laptops, Laptops
The HP Pavilion 2000-210US has been launched at Wal-Mart and other retailers at the affordable price of $428. At such a low price the HP Pavilion notebook is pretty attractive, right? However is the cheap price indicative of the laptops overall value as a mobile computer? Let’s look at just what HP provides buyers of this new $428 laptop.
First off the HP Pavilion 2000-210US is a standard size laptop with a 15.6-inch HD (1366 x 768) LED backlit display. The display is branded as an HP BrightView display which leads me to believe the screen will be just okay for viewing if you’re sitting directly in-front of the laptop. Also the display on this budget notebook is in the 16:9 aspect ratio so watching a wide HD movie will be a possibility on this laptop.
Other visible features worth noting include a textured touchpad, dedicated left-and-right mouse buttons, and chiclet keys on the full-sized keyboard that has no dedicated numberpad.
However moving onto the internals this is where the Pavilion 2000 stops being like all the other HP laptops being offered right now. , Internal specifications for this notebook are very modest.
The processor that powers everything is the slow dual-core 2.13 GHz Intel Pentium P6200, it’s not a performance chip in any test but for light computing it will be bearable. As for storage and system memory (the stuff used for multi-tasking and more) a 320GB 5400RPM hard drive and 3GB of DDR3 RAM are provided.
In ports department the laptop has the essentials; three USB 2.0, one VGA, Ethernet LAN, a 2-in-1 memory card reader, and headphone-in microphone-out ports. A webcam is integrated into this machine and a SuperMulti DVD/CD drive. This laptop has support built-in for 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, which are pretty much all the established wireless standards. You should really expect it but Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is pre-installed on this notebook.
The battery included with the Pavilion 2000-210US is of the 6-cell lithium-ion variety and HP estimates battery life at 4.5 hours, but under normal usage (web browsing with display brightness above 50%) expect something in the 2 hours neighborhood.
HP has done a good job drawing up an affordable laptop but with its feature set this laptop is limited in what you will be able to do at reasonable performance levels. For instance with the Intel HD integrated graphics gaming and playing back full HD (1920 x 1080) content will be near impossible with the specifications on this notebook. With the features provided the HP Pavilion 2000-210US is best suited for web browsing, text editing, and other light tasks.
There are better options available for under $500 at the moment. A good step-up from the HP Pavilion 2000-210US is the Acer AS5750-6636 a 15.6-inch LED (1366×768) backlit notebook with a better processor and integrated graphics, more storage and system memory, and the laptop is priced low at $485.69 from Amazon
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