Hewlett Packard Pavilion ZT1151

Good old Hewlett Packard. Its Pavilion ZT1000 series of notebooks offers six permutations of processor, screen size and memory specifications.

We reviewed the ZT1151 which comes with 1.06GHz Celeron, a 15in screen and 256Mb of PC133 memory at £1,299 including VAT, so we had the slowest processor with the largest screen and a middling amount of memory.

Apart from the 1.06GHz Celeron, the series offers a 1.2GHz Celeron or a 1.06GHz Pentium III. There are two screen sizes (14.1in or 15in) and either 128Mb, 256Mb or 512Mb of memory.

HP says this is a slim, lightweight notebook at 2.4kg, but this does not include the drives. We weighed the ZT1151 at 2.95kg including drives, which is rather heavy.

We like the look and feel of the Pavilion a great deal, and are happy to hijack HP's own description: it has "a sleek blue and silver design".

At the time of writing our review notebook differed slightly from the specification on HP's website, with a single 256Mb module of PC133 Ram, rather than two 128Mb, so there is a spare memory slot under a cover on the bottom of the notebook. If you feel the need for a memory upgrade it would be very simple indeed.

It's worth pointing out that the 1.06GHz Celeron in question is the mobile Tualatin (based on a 0.13micron process) part, which has a 256Kb cache and runs on a 133MHz front-side bus. The Pentium III mobile part has a 512Kb cache, so the Celeron and Pentium III are very similar.

The graphics chipset is S3 Savage 4 and uses up to 32Mb of system memory, but our 3Dmark test results shows that 3D graphics performance is poor. Similarly, our Sysmark 2001 results are quite typical for a Celeron, which are rather poor.

Don't buy this notebook if you want high performance or fancy playing 3D games. That may sound like we've totally written the ZT1151 off, but that's far from the truth. Performance does matter, but the features, battery life and ergonomics of a notebook are more important as they are built in and can't be changed.

The focus of this notebook is the chassis and it's really rather good. The 15in XGA screen has a native resolution of 1,024 x 768. The keyboard is decent, and the layout has been well thought out.

The five shortcut keys above the keyboard have blue back lights and there are also blue lights around the upper edges of the touch pad. These help you use the Pavilion in a dimly lit room, for instance during a presentation.

Above the touch pad, there is an on/off button so you can type without activating the mouse, and to the side of the touch pad there is a separate scroll pad. These features may seem minor, but they separate the ZT1000 series from more generic notebooks.

HP has put the most commonly used controls and sockets close to hand. On the left side, there is a headphone mini jack and a single USB for a mouse. On the right are volume controls and a mute button, and on the front there are CD and MP3 playback controls.

Further back on the left side you get local area network, modem, Firewire and a single full-height PC Card slot. The most mundane connectors have been left on the back of this notebook, comprising printer, VGA, S-Video out, two more USB, speaker and microphone jacks.

The rest of the specifications are appropriate to the low price tag. The Hitachi hard drive is only 20Gb in capacity and, although you get a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, you don't get a floppy drive.

Battery life is excellent, lasting two hours, 36 minutes in our usual Excel test. We are, however, slightly mystified at how HP gets such long life, putting it down to a combination of the lithium-ion battery and the mobile Celeron processor.

You also get a reasonable software package including Microsoft Works Suite 2002, Word 2002 and Windows XP Home edition.

Price: £1,299 (£1,105.53 ex VAT)

Contact: Hewlett Packard 08705 474 747
www.hp.com/uk