Full Review

Due to emergency project needs the consultancy I work for purchased 3 HP XE2 PII 366 with 192 meg ram, 6 gig hd and Win NT4 SP4. We normally do not use HP but when the project was in jeopardy due to a lack of client supplied hardware we bit the bullet and made the emergency purchase. The principle factors in purchasing the brand and model were price and immediate availability.

Six months later these machines have been put through the ringer and have work like champs. Twelve to sixteen hours per day for rigorous use, thousands of airline miles and some very dusty environments and no issues of any sort relating to durability or effective use.

The only issue that has cropped up is an occasional failure to initialize the com port for the built in modem. The symptom is a system lock up when using dial up networking. This occurs once in a while and resolved by rebooting. While this is annoying when it occurs it does not happen with great frequency.

My opinion of HP as a laptop manufacturer has risen significantly as a result of this batch of laptops. My previous experience had been with the older HP units with the popout mouse. HP has really come a long way!!!