HP Pavilion t819.uk Photosmart PC - P4 515 2.93 GHz > Reviews > The affordable yet powerful PC.

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Design	Good
Manufacturer Support	Excellent
Ease of use	Very easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Affordable, flexible, good quality, nice looking .
Disadvantages:	TV capture is naff, HD smaller than advertised

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

This PC is a good buy for someone without a huge amount of cash on their hands.

I bought this PC about five months ago from Comet and I have very few qualms about it. It's hugely expandable.

With the original 256MB of RAM, 3GHz processor, 120GB HD and 128MB in-built graphics card this PC is more than capable of tackling everyday tasks and light gaming. The hard drive is actually close to 100GB - it's capacity is around 110GB with about 4GB used up by built-in HP recovery software. It makes you wonder why it needs pre-installed recovery software but, with todays users, I guess it's explainable. The RAM in the PC is the PC3200 type and it cost me about £40 to upgrade to 700+ MB from Crucial Technologies. The graphics processor is alright - nothing special. Unsurprising as it's an Intel one, along with the processor. I had to upgrade to a 256MB ATI card using the PCI Express slot on the motherboard. Yes, I did say PCI-E! The computer has a DVD+/- RW drive with a spare slot below. There are many connection possibilities including seven or so USB ports, firewire, S-Video & composite inputs, built in ethernet port.

There are three PCI slots, one of which is free. The modem and TV capture card are installed here. The HD is connected to the motherboard by SATA, and there are four slots for RAM in total if you feel like upgrading. There is a free CD/DVD drive bay.

When upgraded the computer is superb. Overall, very good value for money. The TV capture card could be better, but there have been no major hardware faults or anything so far to make up for the few problems.