HP Pavilion HDX: The Laptop That's Not for Your Lap

When I first sighted the HP Pavilion HDX or HDX9160ea in UK codenamed "The dragon", I literally drooled. The system was soooo COOL and beautiful. At first look I thought it was a laptop but when I took a closer look at the specifications, I was a bit confused.

First thing you'd notice on the specifications sheet is that the HP Pavilion HDX has a 20.1 inch screen. Twenty inch! That's HUGE! So I thought, wait, this is definitely not a laptop but then it has the word notebook all over its name so which is it really, a notebook or a desktop PC?

In my opinion, I definitely won't put the HP Pavilion HDX in the category of notebook PC though it does look like a notebook in every sense of the word. You can close the LCD lid and all. However, portability-wise, the HP Pavilion HDX is definitely NOT a laptop. Weighing in at 15 pounds, it's like carrying three standard laptops! When closed, the HP Pavilion HDX measures nineteen inches across so it would take up a lot of space on your desk. However, the HP Pavilion is a perfect media center for your home as you can move it from room to room or bring it with you when you're on an extended vacation but again, this is definitely not the kind of notebook that you would want to bring with you to Starbucks.

The HP Pavilion HDX features an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor and you can choose from the T7500 (2.2 GHz), T7700 (2.4 GHz), or T7800 (2.6GHz), and if you're really bent on splurging, you can even choose an Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor X7900. You can also choose your screen resolution from the standard 1680 x 1050 to the 1920 x 1200 with True HD 1080p resolution. The graphics card on the HP Pavilion HDX is a 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600XT and you can choose your hard drive capacity from 240GB to a whopping 500GB 5400RPM SATA Dual hard drive!

The keyboard on the HP Pavilion HDX is very spacious, plus on the left side, it houses a remote control so you can control Windows Media Center or any entertainment applications and watch your HD-DVD videos from a distance. Speaking of HD-DVD, what I didn't like about the HP Pavilion HDX is that you only get to choose to have an HD-DVD drive or the standard DVD drive, not HD-DVD versus Blu-ray which is probably a downer for Blu-ray fans.

The Intel Core 2 Duo Processor on the HP Pavilion is more than enough if you're going to use this for home entertainment purposes but if you really want to go all out and have money to spare, go for the Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor and upgrade the memory to 4GB, Blu-ray fans, ditch the free upgrade to HD-DVD and just purchase an external Blu-ray drive from Sony, problem solved!