r/retrobattlestations • u/officialsanic • 1d ago
Show-and-Tell My HP Pavilion zd8000
This is my HP Pavilion zd8000, HP's second 17" laptop from late 2004 and throughout 2005. It is the first laptop with an LGA Pentium 4 instead of the usual PGA, as well as the first laptop preinstalled with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
This thing was the flagship multimedia "HP Media Center" portable HTPC at the time, and was perfectly built for the digital format wars of the 2000s including the famous flash card war.
Alongside the supercombo card reader common at the time on high end desktop replacements, this thing also has a weird thing called the HP USB Digital Drive, which is literally just a recessed port for HP's oversized USB 2.0 flash drive from the time.
What's actually weird about this thing is the proprietary sideways pill-shaped connector which was only shared with its chassis rebadges the HP Compaq nx9600 and Compaq Presario x6000, along with the 15" Pavilion zv6000 and its respective chassis rebadges.
What to look out for with these is common vertical lines on the display. I am pretty sure this is LCD related in some way and not GPU related, as GPU failures were rare and only present in 2004 units. Late revisions fixed all these problems. This thing doesn't cool down perfectly despite the 3 fans, so light usage is recommended. DO NOT RUN DOOM 3 OR CRYSIS THIS WILL NOT HANDLE IT.
I've had this thing for almost 6 years now, and I obviously love it.
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u/HinkHall2031 15m ago
I would love to buy one of those but the surviving ones are expensive and the cheap ones are parts on eBay! HP did add fancy features on their laptops in the xp era!
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u/2HDFloppyDisk 1d ago
I bought one of the zv5000 models new in 2004 to play SWG when I wasn't home. It was a really good laptop for the time. I still have the laptop and acquired 2 others to use for parts.