Computers / Desktops / I Love this Desktop

For several years, my husband and I have been itching to get a new computer. Finally, this spring, we bought an hp Pavilion. I must say I am quite impressed with this machine. This computer is fast and as quiet as a mouse.

We chose Hewlett Packard because we have never been dissatisfied with their products. We also own an hp printer and scanner.

Our old computer was a Compaq, which is in the Hewlett Packard family. That computer still works; our teen inherited it. It has a 33 gig hard drive with 1 gig RAM.

For comparison, our new hp Pavilion has a 500 gig hard drive with 5 gigs RAM. This baby works at lightning speeds compared to the Compaq. With the Compaq, I would turn it on, go make coffee, go for a walk, make breakfast, and it still would be booting. The new Pavilion can be powered on and computing in less than 2 minutes!

The hp Pavilion Desktop came as a package with a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I found the same deal at Best Buy for about the same money but the Best Buy computer did not have any pre-loaded software other than Vista.

For $698 at Wal-Mart, we got Vista plus all your essentials: a Microsoft package with Works, games, Quicken, a Norton trial, and more. I could not believe the computers at Best Buy did not have the essentials. The sales clerk said this is the new trend for computers.

Converting to Vista from XP has been relatively painless. In the first days, my old XP habits died hard. I also had issues with connecting my older devices to it. Everything I own is XP driven, so I had to visit various sites to download Vista software and drivers.

The truth be known, I did not want Vista because of what I heard about it. I will not go into it here because I am sure you heard the same things. I am over it now and like how this operating system works. I am pretty sure most of the complaints originated from owners having to download so much software to make all their goodies work. 

The keyboard and mouse are still on the "I'm not used to this" list. The mouse is LED. I cannot stand how it jumps around on the screen sometimes. I am using a mouse pad with it to reduce glare, but it still gets quirky.

The keyboard is very slim and sits lower on our keyboard tray. I need to raise it further than the built-in lifts or get a new tray. It also has so many buttons for quick access to things, getting used to it is taking some time.

Thinking back, my first PC cost near $2000 and all I got was a 512 mb hard drive. I am tickled with what you get now for less than half the cost. If you are in the market for a new computer, I suggest looking at the hp Pavilion.

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