Standardised at last. Review on HP Vectra VL400

Afraid of buying an HP PC because of proprietory cabinets and mother boards that make upgrades difficult or only possible through HP ? . Well the HP Vectra VL 400 has changed all that. The system comes with a mid sized ATX cabinet that can be opened from the side by just lifting a lever, just like an automobile door handle. Inside the Hard disk is mounted inside a separate enclosure facing outward (sideways mounted) so adding or removing the drive is a breeze. Moreover, the whole Hard disk mounting enclosure slides out by just pressing a lever. The Hard disk enclosure can take two 3.5 inch drives. The motherboard is a standard ATX layout. The only unusual arrangement was the cooling arrangement for the Pentium III processor. A big heat sink is mounted on the processor and the heat sink is ducted to the bottom of the 200 Watt switched mode power supply unit. So it's really using the power supply fan to cool the heat sink. Pretty nifty way to save on one cooling fan. Only problem is if for any chance the power supply fan packs up, the processor would fry but I suppose the power supply is built to last like any other HP machine.

Coming to the computing part, the PC came pre-installed with Windows 98 Second Edition and was also certified for Windows 2000. The unit ships with a recovery CD ROM and a driver CD ROM. The Hard disk contains a small partition containing the HP diagnostics software. This software constantly monitors the PC and warns against unauthorised cabinet opening, change in configurations, processor temperature, condition of the Hard disks etc.

I have re-partitioned and installed Redhat Linux 7.1 on a 4 GB partition using LILO to multiboot to Win 98 when required. The Linux installation was a breeze. All the hardware were correctly detected and did not need any bothersome manual configuration. Configured as a File Server in a Windows environment with Samba it also doubles as an intranet Web Server using Apache. I have had it for 7 months. No problems yet.