HP Pavilion S7220N Review

Car manufacturers say that, after years of SUV worship, U.S. drivers are starting to eye fuel-efficient subcompacts like those long popular in Europe and Asia -- Chevy has the Aveo, and the new Honda Fit and Toyota Yaris are smaller than those brands' Civic and Corolla, respectively. HP's newest Pavilion retail PCs take the same route: They show that entry-level Web/e-mail/schoolwork desktops needn't come in traditional tower cases.

The Pavilion S7220N is roughly the size of a hardcover dictionary or big-city phone book, standing 9.7 inches tall with a 4.4 by 13.1-inch footprint; it weighs about 14 pounds. Size aside, it's a reasonably well-equipped home PC, with 512MB of memory, a 200GB hard disk, double-layer DVD±RW drive, 10/100Mbps Ethernet, and 56Kbps modem. Flash-card slots and one USB 2.0 port up front are joined by one FireWire and four more USB ports in back.

For the sake of almost silent operation -- a cooling fan kicks in only under strenuous conditions -- the CPU comes from Intel's laptop inventory: the Celeron M 370, a 1.5GHz processor with 400MHz front-side bus and 1MB of Level 2 cache.

Finally, while the Celeron M may not be the fastest thing under the sun, HP itself can move pretty quickly: While we were testing our S7220N, the company replaced it on retail shelves with an updated model S7310N, which steps down from a 200GB to 160GB Serial ATA hard drive but makes up for it with more memory-expansion headroom -- two DIMM memory sockets instead of our review unit's one.

All well and good, electronics-superstore shoppers say, but what's the sticker price? The Pavilion S7310N costs $480, dropping to $430 for owners who finish the rigmarole of a mail-in rebate. Another $70 buys an S7320N model with a slightly faster 1.6GHz Celeron M 380 chip, more system memory, the 200GB hard disk, and Windows XP Media Center Edition instead of Win XP Home. Those are tempting figures, especially considering that HP has stuck with a one-year warranty instead of following some competitors' cuts to 90 days.

We've Seen Notebooks More Expandable Than This

Removing three screws lets you look under the hood, where the tiny Asus motherboard is barely visible beneath the CPU cooling fan and HP DVD Writer 740B -- a DVD±RW drive with write speeds of 16X for DVD+R, 8X for DVD-R, and 2.4X for double-layer DVD+R and 40/24/40X CD-RW performance. The drive also supports HP's LightScribe technology, which lets users etch titles and simple artwork onto the flip side of extra-cost discs. There is a single PCI slot holding the Agere modem.

The 7,200-rpm Samsung Serial ATA hard disk hides under the optical drive, while the DIMM memory socket can't be seen without removing components. Again, while our S7220N had an unacceptable single socket holding 512MB of DDR-2/400, the newer S7310N has two sockets, each holding the same, for a 1GB total. Obviously, upgrading to the maximum 2GB will mean throwing out the memory modules already installed. Coincidentally, HP's support site for the Pavilion includes a document entitled "Increasing System Resources and Performance Without Adding Memory."

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