Manufacturer: Hewlett Packard
Price: $1399
A laptop; such a wonderful thing to have, but not quite the easiest thing to buy. Why are there so many options, and so many configurations; what should I get?!
I had this same dilemma when my Dell Inspiron 4000 (P3 850mhz, 256mb Ram) was not quite keeping up with my computing needs. So I took the plunge and began searching for a new system.
I came to HP's website knowing their long presence in the market place might help with their innovative touches. I was without a doubt not disappointed. To myself, a laptop is a delicate balancing of power and performance along with the ability to be mobile. So a laptop that is fast, wireless, has good battery life, and also not a mammoth would do perfectly! Not quite as easy to find as one would think. Although HP does a wonderful job in their zt3000 line of notebooks to fit this bill.
The United States preconfigured model of this particular series is known by the model number zt3201. It is a slim-line notebook configured with the Intel Centrino package (which consits of a Pentium M processor, and an Intel integrated wireless controller). =More specifically the zt3201 has a 1.5ghz processor, and two 256mb PC2700 DDR chips to total up to 512mb of RAM. Also inside of this machine comes an Ati Radeon 9200.
Now some people are still leary about getting a Pentium-M chip, as it is not "as powerful" as a Pentium 4. This is similar to the discussion of how AMD chips are not as fast as Intel chips because "their clock speeds are not the same". This is as far from the truth as one could possibly be. Here is a wonderful link discussing the new Pentium M processor. To summarize:
With these results, we can assume that the 1.6GHz version of the Pentium M would be very near a 3.06GHz Pentium 4....
and
Clocked at only 1.3GHz, the Pentium M shows the same score as a 2.4GHz Pentium 4. The Pentium 4 3.06GHz is at first place scoring 200, and we can estimate that, in order to achieve the same score, the Pentium M should be clocked just below 1.7GHz
So you can clearly see the comparisons. With that said, let's get back to the laptop itself.
HP's box comes with all the goodies including software, manuals, and a power supply. You can pull the laptop out of the box and it boots right up into Windows! Ready to go! Now I like HP, but they still load too much extra stuff on a system for my liking, so I booted into the system once, looked around for about 10 seconds (also noticing about 5gb of space gone), closed the lid, and proceeded to load my own copy of Windows XP Pro on the system :) After my version of Windows XP Pro was on the system (only about 2gb used) I was ready to begin customizing the laptop for myself.
Now we know a little more background, let's take a look at the technical specifications