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Perfect for light home use: The largest segment of computer users are primarily web browsers who use the occasional Office application. If that’s you then this is a really good choice. It’s small, well featured, and very well built. I’ve had a few opportunities to use these HP Slimline computers and I’ve been able to give them a good look over. The build quality is really good – on par with their higher end Pavilions and much better than their Compaq line.

Spec wise it’s a good machine for a home user:

A solid dual core CPU. The AMD Athlon X2 7750 is a good choice for home users – not so powerful that it needs a lot of [loud] cooling but powerful enough to keep several apps going at once without noticing any slowdown. My min spec for any computer purchase is at least a dual core CPU so you can run your internet security suite in the back ground without your web browser grinding to a halt.

4GB is more than enough ram, which means you are future proofed a bit.

500GB Hard drive. Again, more than most users need but that just means you’re less likely to run out of space. Unless you do a lot of video editing your aren’t likely to need more space than this anytime soon. (I know maybe three or four non-gamers using more than 200GB of HDD space.)

The NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE graphics is probably my least favorite component here. The performance is a little better than the Intel embedded graphics but not by much. You can’t do any serious gaming with it and Nvidia has had some reliability issues. However that’s been with higher end products and this one is almost certainly fine. Still, not my first choice (all things being equal I’d suggest ATI for graphics right now).

Let me be clear: there not much you can upgrade on this computer. There’s no way to upgrade the graphics, there’s only room for one HDD, and while you can replace the memory and cpu I don’t recommend it (this thing has a very careful thermal profile and it’s too small a box to really mess with that. As long as you are okay with that, and don’t plan on doing any heavy gaming then this is a far better choice than plopping a big ugly box on your desktop.

Oh and since this is a good dorm computer… if you are a student check out HP’s “Academy Program” on their web site (Google “HP Academy”, it’s too hard to find from HP’s site). You may be able to get a student discount on this or something like it.

To check price or purchase HP Pavilion Slimline S5120F Desktop PC.

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