HP Pavilion 764N

WHAT ELSE: Equipped with a 2.67-GHz Pentium 4 CPU and 512MB of DDR266 memory, our review machine earned a 115 score on PC WorldBench 4, exactly average for our current crop of value systems. Though it's not the fastest system we've tested, it should handle video editing and encoding just fine, and it has more than enough power for Web surfing and general productivity tasks. In our test games, the 764N performed adequately; the GeForce MX440-based graphics card (equipped with 128MB of RAM) produced reasonably good frame rates at resolutions up to 1280 by 1024 pixels. The monitor we received with our test unit didn't support 1600 by 1200 screen resolution, so the system couldn't complete all of our game tests.

The Pavilion 764N looks stylish in its blue-and-silver-tone case, and the color scheme extends to the keyboard and the 17-inch HP MX75 CRT monitor, yielding an eye-pleasing package. This monitor delivered adequate but unexciting image quality. Text was easy to read, though not especially sharp--a problem if you'll primarily be using the PC to work with text. The colors in a DVD movie and in games looked somewhat muted compared with the output of other 17-inch CRTs we've seen.

The HP keyboard is as solid as a rock. It has fewer programmable keys than other keyboards, but it provides buttons for launching a media player, adjusting volume settings, and navigating CD tracks. One unusual key launches the HP Picture Toolkit, an integrated suite of applications for doing creative things with digital images. Among the programs is ArcSoft PhotoImpression, which contains typical entry-level image editing tools, but also lets you create photo slide shows with music.

This Pavilion's software bundle also includes the WordPerfect Productivity Pack, a suite containing WordPerfect 10, the spreadsheet program Quattro Pro, and Quicken 2003 New User Edition.

UPSHOT: This Pavilion is reasonably priced and generously equipped.