HP's Pavilion a1410n series of ready-made desktop computers for home offer great core power at an excellent price. They're fine multimedia systems, although perhaps not the best gaming machines.

The core power in these home desktop computers consists of an AMD Athlon 64 3800+, a 2.4GHz, 64-bit processor that is ready for tomorrow's applications and operating systems such as Windows Vista. And HP provides a healthy 1GB of 400MHz DDR memory with that CPU. It's not the fastest memory out there, but having a gigabyte of RAM is a nice performance boost for performing multimedia tasks.

And HP is gearing these home desktop computers towards multimedia enthusiasts with Windows XP Media Center edition as the bundled operating system. This OS helps you organize and manage all your multimedia files. The OS is also TV ready, although there's no TV tuner card in the a1410n systems. But it's an upgrade you can make easily to convert your home desktop computer into a digital video recorder (DVR).

The rest of the system fits the Media Center label swimmingly. The 200GB 7,200rpm hard drive can store up to 75,000 photos at normal resolutions. It also gives you plenty of room for video storage and application installations.

This home desktop computer's optical drive is one of the best you can find. It's a 16X Double Layer DVD writer with LightScribe technology built in. In addition to normal DVDs, this drive can burn to DL media for storage of massive amounts of data (up to 8.5GB) or four hours of high-quality video on a single disk. And HP's own LightScribe technology lets you burn a silkscreen-quality, monochromatic label on the surface of compatible media.

That software bundle is multimedia oriented as well. In addition to burning software, there's HP's PhotoSmart Premier 6 for editing and organizing photos and Muvee autoProducer for editing your home video collection. And there are some productivity programs thrown into the mix: Microsoft Works 8.0 for writing school papers or bringing office work home and financial packages Quicken New User 2006 and Microsoft Money 2006.

We mentioned earlier that gaming may not be the strength of these home desktop computers. That's because the integrated graphics don't offer the best 3D gaming performance. It is NVIDIA's GeForce 6150 LE integrated graphics, so the performance is better than some other options, but it still shares video memory with the main system RAM. Luckily, there's an open PCI Express slot on the motherboard so gamers can add a high-end video card to these home desktop computers and convert them into much better gaming machines.

Audio is integrated as well, although it's high definition sound that supports up to 8-speaker configurations. And the HP multimedia keyboard makes it easy to control your audio and video files from your fingertips.

HP doesn't include a display at the baseline price of these systems, but you can find them at a variety of retailers who often bundle one with the home desktop computer. We were able to find this system and a 15-inch flat panel display for around $670 at our local computer store.

There's also no floppy drive, but the 9-in-1 media card reader and USB ports for thumb drives more than makes up for this now fairly standard omission. The media card reader supports a variety of formats from CompactFlash to SD to Memory Stick and makes it easy to transfer photos or music from your compatible digital camera or MP3 player.

There are two USB 2.0 ports on the front of the system, in addition to four in the back, for thumb drives or high-speed peripherals and a Firewire port up front as well. There are also headphone out and microphone in ports on the front of these home desktop computers, making it easy to connect a headset for online phone conversations or videoconferencing.

HP includes both a modem and a network interface so you can connect these home desktop computers to the Internet via broadband or dial-up service providers.

HP offers a one-year limited warranty on these desktop computers for home users and you can extend the coverage for about $100 a year. You can also expand the coverage to include accidental damage protection at $150 for two years.

The HP Pavilion a1410n series of Media Center desktop computers for home users offers great multimedia performance at a price that is quite affordable for the average user.


Pros: Great multimedia performance, nice price
Cons: Integrated graphics

Warranty
1-year limited