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Life with only a Notebooks, PC or Mac?
Part 1, mid-market class
Hewlett-Packard
ze5000
The Hewlett-Packard brand has been persistently conspicuous as one of
four companies vying for the top spot in notebook market share during
the last decade and a half. But, things have been changing as two of
those top competitors are now one, and only HP President Fiorina knows
for sure how the products will shake out.
One casualty in the HP product like has been the venerable OmniBook, a favorite of IT and upper management buyers. And indeed, it looks like HP product line is going more for the young buyer, rather than the conservative management business buyer.
The HP ze5000 retains some of the traditional HP conservative lines, but it is now decorated with rather bright green and blue indicator LED’s for a decided hip look. We feel the LED’s are too bright and an irritating distraction in a dim room, or on a cross-country flight. Some of our evaluation team said that they could ignore the distraction eventually. HP’s notebook product evaluation manager told us that the lights were popular with their buyers.
Otherwise, the ze5000 is very similar to recent offerings from HP, average size, and weight at 7.5 lbs. It is an attractive business looking Notebook with non-obtrusive lines and solid sturdy construction. The touch-pad is nice and big, with large left-right click buttons that are easy to find while you’re “fingertip navigating” around the desktop. There is no “scroll button”, but there is a section of the touch-pad strictly for scrolling vertically.
HP has generally always done a very good job of placing function indicator lights for HDD, CD, Cap Lock, etc. and function
buttons in the right
places, the ze5000 is no exception.
Port placement is one area we really liked. There are two USB 1.1, one i.Link Firewire, one Parallel and PS/2 port located on the back panel of the notebook, which is where they belong. HP has wisely added a third USB 1.1 port on the right side back of the notebook, just perfect for an external mouse when you’re working at your desk.
Does
it pass desktop muster?
The
HP ze5000 packs a pretty good punch for any mid-market (price) notebook
with its 2.0 GHz Intel P4 Mobile processor and 512 MB of RAM. The ze5000
is the fastest Notebook in our review group.
The ATI Mobility M6 video card with 32MB of dedicated RAM was up to our battery of Flash MX, Photoshop 6, Director 7 and DVD movie play. As with other Notebooks in this mid-market class, gaming is not measure of acceptability, however the ze5000 will be adequate for moderate game playing needs when your boss isn’t looking.
WiFi accessibility is an option when you order a unit BTO (built to order) and it is an internal card, leaving your two Type 2 CardBus slots for something else to use like a CompactFlash Card adaptor for downloading camera pictures and perhaps a MicroDrive.
As with some other Notebooks we have been reviewing, the HP ze5000 has a native resolution of 1400x1050. While that resolution setting is great if you have a 21” monitor, it is far to high for reading any text at normal font sizes in Word documents or one web sites. If you select a lower resolution, such as the standard 1024x768 for 15” displays, everything seems fuzzy. No matter what combinations of font or sizes we selected, the desktop and applications remained fuzzy at any resolution setting other than 1400x1050.
We don’t know whether to blame the video card makers, forcing this on the Notebook makers, or it is by choice of the Notebook manufacturers. What are you “guys” thinking? Granted, 1400x1050 gives you a lot of desktop territory, but this resolution setting does not belong on a 15” or 16” TFT display no matter how good the quality is.
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