Pavilion Slimline s7525a

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The tiny HP Pavilion Slimline PC (s7525a) would happily find a home in any environment. While it may not be the fastest performer, its compact design and media centre functionality make it a good value option.

Pros

  • Vista premium from 1st March, digital coaxial audio, media card reader, small form factor

Cons

  • Celeron M CPU, limited upgrade options

Bottom Line

Though it's not the fastest performer that we've tested in this price bracket, the Pavillion Slimline is a compact, stylish and functional PC that will suit the home environment.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 1,399.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

The Pavilion Slimline is a complete package that includes a keyboard, mouse and 17in LCD monitor. The system reviewed was running Windows Media Center Edition (MCE), however it will ship with Windows Vista Premium as of 1st March 2007. Built with an Intel Celeron M 1.6GHz CPU and touting 512MB of DDR2 533MHz RAM, the Pavilion Slimline managed a score of 71 in our World Bench 5 test. This is a low score when compared to other PCs in its price range, but it should still run most common software packages.

Critically, the Pavillion Slimline makes up for its low score with some excellent media centre functionality. This includes a 9-in-1 media card reader supporting CF I/II, SM, MMC, SD, MS/MS-Pro, MD and xD media cards. It also comes with a FireWire port for connecting a camcorder, a 7.1 channel audio port with analogue outputs and a digital coaxial output, an S-Video-out port as well as a composite video-out port for watching movies on your regular television.

We encoded 53 minutes of WAV files to 192Kbps MP3s, which took the Pavilion Slimline two minutes and 45 seconds, a slow result in this price bracket and a rather disappointing result for a media centre PC. This machine is better suited to casual media centre users looking for a compact solution rather than power users who want to encode their entire music library.

Unfortunately, an 80GB hard drive isn't adequate for a media centre and the small chassis doesn't allow any additional drives to be installed. If you find yourself running out of storage space, an external USB, LAN or FireWire storage device is always an option, as is the installed DVD-rewriter. The DVD drive is concealed behind the front panel and emerges when ejected, giving the face a clean, uncomplicated feel. A single USB port and headphone jack are also available on the front panel for easy access.

The rear the Pavilion Slimline offers plenty of USB connectivity with five USB 2.0 ports and only one of these needs to be occupied for the supplied wireless keyboard and mouse hub. Should you need an extra port though, the Slimline includes PS2 ports.

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