Digital Trends

HP Pavilion a6130n July 30th, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Setup and Use

Setting up the HP Pavilion a6130n is easy. In the box is the a6130n itself, the keyboard, mouse, power cord, modem cable, product documentation and disks. It took me less than 2 minutes to open the box, plug everything in and turn the a6130n on. I wasn't rushing - it's just that fast and easy. Even the plugs in the back of the computer are color-coded for those unfamiliar with setting up computers.

The initial boot and setup took less than 5 minutes. Once the a6130n was configured, an external timer showed that a cold boot took 1 min 16 seconds to the Vista desktop. While several of my computers fully boot in less than 30 seconds, the 1 minute 16 second boot for the a6130n is on par for this class of desktop system, especially one running Vista in all its Aero glory.

The a6130n was configured with 3GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM, which is the standard complement, and is more than enough for Windows Vista. If you run the a6130n with Windows XP Pro (and 3GB RAM), you'll find that it just screams.

Running programs like Microsoft Word and Photoshop show the a6130n's speed. Word opens in less than 1.5 seconds, additional docs open in less than .5 seconds. Photoshop is speedy too, with 4MB files opening in 2-3 seconds, and 20MB files opening in 3-5 seconds. In one of my tests, I was able to have 20 full-res 10 megapixel photos open in Photoshop, 20 documents in Word and 20 tabbed websites open in IE7 (and Firefox, respectively) with iTunes playing a video, and the a6130n never felt sluggish. I could have doubled my activity and the a6130n would have been ready to go full-force.

The 15-in-1 memory card bank on the front of the a6130n is very handy. No more external USB memory card adapters to deal with (or lose), and no more connecting digital cameras and media devices to the computer with cheap-feeling USB cables.

The 16X LightScribe DVD drive is better than a generic DVD-RW drive because it can be used to burn images and text onto the top surface of specially coated DVDs and CDs. This feature can help eliminate the sloppy hand-written content notes on your discs.

After having run the integrated nVidia GeForce 6150 LE video card through the mud on HP's Slimline systems, I knew that the a6130n's video card was going to perform well. Of course, the a6130n comes with the nVidia GeForce 6150 SE card and offers 128MB shared video memory. I tested some DVDs on an HP w2207 LCD monitor and on an LG LCD TV. The a6130n gave excellent results on both types of screens and under various circumstances, such as Photoshop, DVD-playback, AVI playback and a few simple games. Despite the fact that the a6130n has only an analog VGA output, the picture quality was quite fine. The 6150 SE card certainly could never compete with today's standard of video cards, especially for gaming, but for basic performance, it does quite well.

Upgrading the a6130n after purchase is relatively easy, especially the hard drive, RAM, video card and DVD drive. The motherboard has two PCI slots (one in use by the modem card), a PCI-Express x1 slot, a PCI-Express x16 slot and IDE connections for upgrading purposes.

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