HP Pavilion w5161 review

HP's w5161 is supplied without a monitor and is aimed at those looking to upgrade.

Its inoffensive silver case features two hatches on the front. The right hatch houses USB2, FireWire, microphone and headphone ports, and the left accommodates a removable 300GB Personal Media Drive, which can connect to another PC via USB. Combined with the internal 160GB hard disk, this gives the Pavilion a huge 460GB of storage. The Personal Media Drive is large and heavy, though, and requires a separate power adaptor to connect to a non-HP PC.

The Pavilion has two optical drives, one of which is a LightScribe DVD writer. The LightScribe labelling is probably better for the longevity of your DVDs than handwriting or stick-on labels, but it is quite slow, with speeds of only 8X DVD-R and 2.4X DVD+R DL. Writing the LightScribe label takes around 50 minutes. HP should have junked the DVD-ROM drive in favour of a second, faster non-LightScribe writer to give the best of both worlds.

The Pavilion is unsuitable as a gaming machine; its ATI Radeon X600 graphics card managed only 10.6 fps in our Doom 3 test. It did better with non-gaming tasks, however; its score in our video-encoding test was particularly good, due to the fast Pentium 4 630 processor. This processor also supports 64-bit instructions, so you can upgrade to the 64-bit version of Windows when more applications are available.

The Pavilion w5161 doesn't include a monitor or speakers, so it's best for users with existing peripherals who want to upgrade their PCs. However, at this price we'd expect a monitor to be included, and the w5161 isn't very good value. There is a wireless networking adaptor included that can connect to 802.11b, g and even a. There is also a decent software spread featuring a gaggle of Microsoft titles, including Word 2002. The bundled ball mouse is poor, though.

If it were cheaper, the Pavilion would be a great upgrade for those who already own a monitor and don't play games. As it stands, it's just too expensive to recommend, despite its neat touches and large amount of storage.