HP Pavilion ze5375us Notebook PC (2.40-GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

For the next day, there were so many errors and blue screens of death, I had to wipe the entire system. By that time, I was so ticked off, I was ready to stuff it back in the box and take it back.

However, as it turns out, this has happened to more than one or two HP users I know and they gave me some good advice. They told me to just restore from disk. When I restored from disk, it took off all HP's 'special' features and returned it to stable safe XP.

Since then, the computer has run like a dream, and though I have bitter first memories of her, I'm starting to love her now. She's fast, she's reliable, and her display is beautiful. She's relatively lightweight and attractive too (though, don't put her next to a mac or she'll become an ugly duckling).

So, the machine seems to be solid. It's just whatever configuration that HP puts on the machine from factory that seems to be the problem. I might start recommending to people that they just restore from disk the second they take it out of the box and be done with it.

IN any case, I agree that winXP home is complete crap. However, with all that said, after spending quite alot of time (15+ hours) installing XP and all drivers, and using the horribly inadequate networking features of XP to wireless communicate..... Once it was configured, the machine has been performing flawlessly.

I bought the machine for 2 reasons. The first is to write my thesis: alot of math modeling and data crunching, and the machine was not particularly fast. It is substantially slower than a 2.4GHz desk PC, but have not compared it to other laptops. The second reason was to use the new software synthesizers that are hitting the market using USB MIDI. It seems to function quite well, but chokes on very sample heavy sounds (meaning that the HD is a little slow and/or 512MB of memory is not quite enough) such as Steinberg's 'The Grand'. Also, for real-time sound applications, the built-in sound card has huge latency issues mainly due to non-ASIO drivers, but a quality sound card plugged into the PCMCIA bus works well.

All the peripherals are adequate.... and adequate is the key word. The CD, memory, HD are not top performers, but they are not terrible. The saving grace of the machine is the connectivity it offers: 3xUSB, firewire, modem, ethernet, wireless 802.11b, serial, printer, SVGA, IR, 2xPCMCIA slots. Not much more you can ask for in a laptop.

The batteries do not last long at all, well under 2 hours. This is personally not much of an issue, but is something to consider.

All in all, I am happy with the machine, but very unhappy with the operating system that was shoved down my throat....