If you spend a lot of time burning CDs or DVDs for friends, you'll want to check out the $1,350 HP Pavilion a1050y. Complete with HP's LightScribe DVD burner for emblazoning your own designs onto specially coated discs, this PC gives you a unique way to personalize a gift and should earn you a few extra thoughtfulness points from the recipient. Its performance is merely average, but the Pavilion a1050y is an able, all-purpose mainstream machine.
The HP Pavilion a1050y, a replacement to the Pavilion a850y, comes with two optical drives built into its clean-lined front panel. You'll also find a 9-in-1 media-card reader, three USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 400 port, and a set of audio jacks integrated into the front-side design, which presents this full array of inputs and outputs in an accessible, visually pleasing manner.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The back is generous with four more USB 2.0 ports, another FireWire 400 port, analog and digital audio jacks, and an Ethernet port. The system comes with a PS/2 keyboard with dedicated media and Internet keys and a PS/2 mouse with a roller ball (we recommend you upgrade to the optical mouse for $10 extra). The HP site says that the a1050y comes with a two-piece speaker set, but our test unit didn't have it. Likewise, we didn't receive a monitor, but you can choose to add one when configuring the system on HP's site (or choose none).
The 16X multiformat, double-layer LightScribe DVD burner comes accompanied by one specially coated LightScribe CD. Extra discs are easy to find online (including HP's site) or in office supply stores, and they sell for about $2 each. The Pavilion a1050y includes three applications that can burn to LightScribe discs--iTunes, Sonic Express Labeler, and InterVideo DiscLabel; we were shocked to see how poorly they all handled the task. iTunes lets you burn only track titles--a waste, since LightScribe can burn grayscale photos for a much more impressive look--and Sonic's app locks the user into predefined templates. InterVideo's tools were clunky and 10 years out of date, but at least they let users create their own designs. After we created a design with photos, graphics, and text, the drive burned it onto the disc in 23 minutes. Amateur bands looking to create their own discs will spend a lot of time with LightScribe.
You can customize the Pavilion a1050y on HP's site, which provides a little wiggle room among mainstream components. Our review unit came with a 3.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 560J processor, 512MB of DDR memory, and a sizable 160GB hard drive. Although HP submitted our test system with the 3.6GHz processor, the company no longer offers that chip for this system. You have your choice of four Pentium 4 500-series processors, ranging in speeds from 2.8GHz to 3.4GHz. Our test system proved to be a strong midrange configuration for home multimedia tasks such as light photo editing and CD burning. Our SysMark test places the Pavilion a1050y about where it should be given its configuration. Sub in the 3.4GHz CPU, and you'll see a slight performance reduction but not enough to prevent the Pavilion a1050y from performing its intended tasks. In fact, we think the sweet spot for mainstream users in terms of price vs. performance is the 3.2GHz Pentium 4 540J for this machine.
If you have gaming in mind, the HP Pavilion a1050y is beyond the help of even the most powerful CPU, thanks to its middling graphics performance. The midrange 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT 3D card is the most powerful card offered on the Pavilion a1050y and was included in our review unit. The resulting 3D scores, while playable, don't bode well for this system as a gaming desktop. On our Half-Life 2 test, it achieved only 40 frames per second (fps) on the modest 1,024x768-resolution test. That's not a horrendous score, and you should be able to tackle older games with few problems, but clearly the Pavilion a1050y wasn't designed as a gaming powerhouse.
The HP Pavilion a1050y's software bundle includes a few standout applications, in particular HP's excellent Image Zone Plus photo editing and organizing software. When you first launch the computer, HP Organize, an all-purpose application organizer and video viewer, starts and takes up nearly a quarter of the desktop on the right-hand side. It has a built-in desktop-and-Web search tool, and a window for quickly finding the system's PC security tools. HP Organize should prove helpful to less-technical users, but anyone else will want to shut it off. HP also includes its own photo organizer and editor, HP Image Zone. You'll also get Apple iTunes, Sonic RecordNow, Microsoft Works 8.0, Money 2005, and a light edition of Quicken. And you'll receive trial versions of Microsoft Office, Symantec Norton Internet Security 2005, or InterMute SpySubtract Pro.
The HP Pavilion a1050y comes with a handy getting-started guide, but it's written for the entire Pavilion line, so it contains a lot of information that doesn't apply to this system. You'll also get a troubleshooting guide, as well as a warranty-and-support guide. HP offers a one-year parts-and-labor warranty and one year of 24/7, toll-free phone support. The 800 number is easy to find in the manual, alongside explanations of where to get help on the company's site. Once you get to HP's support site, you'll find all manner of driver downloads, FAQs, and other resources.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
 | BAPCo SysMark 2004 rating | Â Â | | SysMark 2004 Internet-content-creation rating | Â Â | | SysMark 2004 office-productivity rating | Â Â |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| Half Life 2 1,024x768 4xAA 8xAF | Â Â | | Half Life 2 1,600x1,200 4xAA 8xAF | Â Â |
Find out more about how we test desktop systems.
System configurationsGateway 9310XL
Windows XP Home SP2; 3.2GHz Intel P4 640; Intel 915GSE chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (PCIe); two WDC WD2500JD-22HBB0 250GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA
HP Pavilion a1050y
Windows XP Home SP2; 3.6GHz Intel P4 560; Intel 915G chipset; 512MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6600 (PCIe); Samsung SP1614C 160GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA
*Overdrive Torque 64
Windows XP Home SP2; 2.0GHz AMD Athlon 64 3000+; Nvidia Nforce 3 250 chipset; 512MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT (AGP); Maxtor 6Y200M0 200GB, 7,200rpm Serial ATA
PC Club Enpower Edge
Windows XP Professional SP2; 3.8GHz Intel P4 570; Intel 925X chipset; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT (PCIe); two WDC WD740GD-00FLX0 74GB 10,000rpm Serial ATA; WDC WD2500JD-50HBB0 250GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA; integrated Intel 82801FR SATA RAID controller
Velocity Micro Vector SX-V
Windows XP Home SP2; 3.4GHz Intel P4 550; Intel 915G chipset; 512MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 128MB Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT (PCIe); WDC WD2000JD-00HBB0 200GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA