Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Entertainment PC (6528TX)

In most cases the label "Special Edition" usually means an old product repackaged and stamped with a new inflated price. However, the HP Pavilion Special Edition Entertainment notebook (6528TX) is a viable alternative to the standard HP Pavilion Entertainment PC dv2533tx_01, sporting a new white colour scheme, a larger screen and twice the RAM for just $100 more.

Despite being a good value option, the HP Pavilion 6528TX represents a touch of choice. Sure, it's not as much choice as, say, the new Dell Inspiron range or Sony's VAIO series, which offer a wide variety of colours, but the Pavilion 6528TX does have a unique patterned design that won't be found on other Pavilion notebooks.

A mid-range Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 1.66GHz CPU is installed, with a 2MB L2 cache and a 667MHz front side bus. Rather than use Intel's onboard graphics, an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS graphics card has been used and 2GB of DDR2 system RAM has been installed as well.

With these components the Pavilion 6528TX pushed a score of 67 in World Bench 6, showing it will handle windows Vista without issues and run the most commonly used applications like word processors and Web browsers with relative ease. In the MP3 encoding tests, it took iTunes 102 seconds to convert 53 minutes worth of WAV files to 192Kbps MP3 files and 162 seconds in Cdex.

As is common to Pavilion notebooks, some Altec Lansing speakers are installed, which offer great sound despite their lack of bass, a LightScribe DVD re-writer is also included, there's an HDMI port, media controls (plus a small remote), a webcam and twin headphone jacks to share your media with a friend.

These are all very nice features; however, HP's Pavilion notebooks do have their flaws. At this price you can't expect a top-end screen, so there are no surprises here, but the LCD's viewing angle is abysmal, and the brightness levels aren't crash-hot either. Most notably this makes the screen difficult to share, but overall it's still reasonably comfortable to view. The native resolution is 1280x800, which is quite normal.

The Pavilion 6528TX performed well in our battery test and it has improved over previous generations, but it still doesn't stand out of the pack. In our DVD rundown test it lasted a solid 95 minutes, about the average for similar machine. In gaming tests it didn't shine, scoring only 1330 in 3DMark 2006, but its score of 11,262 in 3DMark 2001 SE shows that older games are going to run fine.