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A Workhorse with or without Wires
By Eric Bass
At a time when portable computing more often means handhelds or pocket computers, Hewlett-Packard has come out with a line of notebook PCs that are light enough to schlep around from planes to trains yet are packed enough with features to be desktop replacements. We got a hold of a zt1190, the most stuffed of the new zt line.
The zt1190′s got high productivity as well as a touch of high- tech entertainment built in. Its prime features are the luxurious 15-inch SXGA LCD, 1.2 GHz Pentium III, 40 GB hard drive, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive and 802.11b wireless networking LAN.
If you’re in it for creative applications, this PC has an IEEE 1394 FireWire port for loading digital video from your camcorder into Windows Media Player or Cyberlink PowerDirector for video editing. If digital music is your thing, check out the blue-lit button labeled MP3 on the front of the computer. Press it and MusicMatch software comes up. There’s also a suite of CD/DVD and track navigation buttons plus some built-in glowing Internet launch buttons to take you directly to your Web sites or
e-mail. If you want to watch DVDs you can use the big LCD screen—great for long plane rides —or use the S-Video out port to hook the computer to a TV. No matter what you’re doing on this baby, its fast processor and 512 MB of SDRAM will be a couple steps ahead of you.
The big screen is a nice touch, especially for DVDs. Where some LCDs have abysmal off-axis viewing, the zt’s screen looks good from all normal angles. The graphics adapter is an S3 Savage4 AGP 4X with hardware motion compensation (for DVD playback) and 16 MB of memory shared with the main system. You can configure that up to 32 MBs, which is a good idea if you plan on playing video games. I loaded up the 3-D shooter Max Payne and was pleased but not blown away with the graphics performance. Textures looked pretty good and edges showed minimal jaggies. The built-in Polk Audio 3-D sound system also does better than you’d expect from a notebook computer.
If you’ve got to get some work done, the software package including MS Works, Quicken Financial Center and MS Money will do it. Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe online is there to help you find answers to obscure questions.
Getting around the screen is made easier by the smart touch pad, which also works as a left-click button when you tap or press it. On the right of the mouse touchpad is a touch scrollpad for easily moving up and down windows and Web pages. It works just like the scroll wheels on desktop mice.
Network-ready is what makes this PC really cool. You can go the 10/100 Ethernet route, but if you really want to be on the edge you’ll take advantage of the WiFi possibilities for 2.4 GHz wireless networking up to 11 mbps data rate. I used the included 802.11b antenna to connect to a Compaq Desktop using Belkin’s Wireless USB Network Adapter. Using Windows XP to set up the network wasn’t the smoothest of affairs, and both HP and Belkin could have included better instructions, but once the computers were talking to each other, sharing files, printer and even Internet connection was smooth as silver. That’s what makes this PC shine. Being able to take the computer out on the back porch and still stay connected to the Web through another computer is a very cool application.
This loaded PC is definitely portable—you can even snap out the WeightSaver optical drive to lighten the load—but it’s got enough muscle to do anything you’d expect from a full-size desktop. And it’s not bad looking either.
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