Customer Reviews
HP, please do something about your batteries...
I had have this computer for a month now, so here goes nothing:
Pros:
- Excellent design
- 4GB Ram, enough for most tasks
- 500GB hard drive, for me that's enough for now
- Small size and little weight (even lighter when DVD is removed, which is an excellent feature in itself)
- Windows 7 (better than Vista, we'll see about XP)
- EXCELLENT PRICE
Cons:
- Battery life is about 2 hours, bound to decrease within 6 months, not on par with most other laptops this size.
- Touchpad really has a mind of its own on ocassion.
- Glossy design is beautiful, but it's also a fingerprint magnet
- Opening it is a cumbersome task, not really bad, but a little.
- Windows 7 "64bit" - Some old programs I use refuse to work in such environment.
All in all a solid laptop, with excellent features (and minor inconveniences), but please, HP, this is my third HP laptop and the batteries have never been your forte. (yet I keep buying HP) DO SOMETHING!
UPDATE: The battery won't last for more than an hour and a half, so I took two stars off my review for this major inconvenience. Sorry to say this, but I no longer recommend this purchase.
Excellent Computer for an Excellent Price
I've owned my computer for almost a week now, and I'm absolutely loving it. For the money I almost bought an Hp with a T6600 processor and 320GB hard drive etc etc. I bought this for the same price as the other hp and got MORE memory and a better processor. Why wouldn't you want an upgrade of 180 GB hard drive for free? If your a student and like to have lots of music, videos and play light gaming and still have tons of room for your homework and projects, this is a great computer.
I also love how its 14" monitor, so I can take it anywhere and fit it into any bag. It has a very sleek and glossy exterior. A little bit of work to keep clean, but that's no reason not to buy a computer. The speakers are great for a laptop. I was actually surprised how clear sounds and music was. As with most HP laptops, you get the lightscribe burner, which is great, but it also comes with a disc replacement thing so if you don't care to use a disc drive, you can remove it and save some weight. But really it doesn't weigh that much.
The only downfall I have with this computer is the slightly low battery life. I think a little bit of that might be my fault cause I just plugged in and played rather than letting the battery charge fully first before I started playing with it.
Great laptop for the price.
Good system, recommended for most
This is a good system to own if you can deal with a few minor annoyances.
Windows 7 works well. Most things are in different places than XP but it's easy to find them.
This system has a basic graphics card. The Windows Experience numbers warn that the Aero interface will be sluggish sometimes, and I definitely feel that's true.
The hard drive impressively large, although not all the 500GB is usable. It is split up into three partitions. One is the system restore partition (since Windows install discs are not included), and one is the quickstart partition (a fast starting non-Windows environment that lets you surf the web and browse your media collection), so the hard drive really has only around 320 mb free when you get it. That's lots for your pictures, videos, music, etc. It's also quite speedy.
4GB RAM standard, which should be more than enough, except that about 1.5 GB are used for the integrated graphics so you only have around 2.5 GB for programs. In the future, when RAM prices come down, I'll be upgrading to 8GB of RAM.
The only ads on the machine are trials of Norton Internet Security 2010 1-User, and Microsoft Office Standard 2007 FULL VERSION, prominent links to HP's accessories store (buy from Amazon instead), an ad for an online backup service, and an icon for one of Amazon's competitors (a Bay Area auction site). Not bad.
I have no problems with overheating here. The touch panel for adjusting volume is very very useful.
LightScribe Technology
