A Product Review of the Reasonably Priced HP Pavilion A6200N

Thanks to some recent price reductions HP has had a number of best selling desktops. The mid range desktops have seen the highest sales figures thanks to the upcoming school year. Mid to late summer is always a hectic time in the market and is probably the best time to buy. I've decided to take the HP Pavilion A6200N for a test drive and give it a quick review. I'll let you know how it performs and if we should expect substantial price reductions anytime soon.

Hardware:

Processor: 2.6 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ dual-core

Storage Space: a 360 GB hard drive

RAM: 2 GB of RAM (upgradable to an 8GB maximum)

Optical Drive: a CD R/RW with integrated 16x dual-layer DVD +/- burner

Open drive bay for an optional HP Pocket Media Drive

Graphics Accelerator: a Nvidia GeForce 6150 graphics card (using up to 128 MB of dedicated memory and more shared system RAM)

This computer has a very solid foundation based off of the dual -core 64bit AMD chip. Luckily it comes with 2GB of RAM which is what I consider a minimum for running Windows Vista. This can be upgraded to 8GB which means in the future you can keep this desktop up to date with memory upgrades. The hard drive offers plenty of space for movies, music, and whatever else. The only disappointment is the graphics card. I would have liked to have seen something a little stronger so one could play high end games.

Connectivity:

6 2.0 USB ports (these are the standard connections for peripherals such as scanners, digital cameras and mp3 players)

2 FireWire ports (these are designed for high speed transfer and can be between digital camcorders or even other compatible PCs)

2 PS/2 ports (old school input device ports)

1 VGA output (a typical monitor connection)

2 audio outputs / 2 microphone inputs

coaxial audio input/output

3 standard surround sound speaker outputs

15 in 1 media card reader (these slots allow the consumer to directly insert memory from their mobile devices into the PC)

1 Ethernet port (this allows the desktop to connect to wired networks)

1 56K modem (to allow this computer to dial up an internet connection)

This desktop has plenty of inputs, in fact the multiple firewire ports are probably a bit of overkill. This computer is an excellent option for a family desktop or even and office desktop. This only type of consumer that may be a bit disappointed is the intense gamer. With an average online retail price around $730 this desktop is right on target. I would expect to see further price drops in August making this a real steal, so you might want to wait around.