HP Pavilion DV7-2040US 17.3-Inch Laptop

This laptop is way beyond my expectations! i have had it for over a week and it's a beast!

PROs: the quad core is amazing. not only is it fast, it adds up to 2Gb to video when gaming. the price is top notch! 2 HDD bays(the 500Gb is actually 2x250Gb), eSATA port, great screen! this is the lightest 17" laptop i've held in a while. while i am an nVIDIA gamer, the ATI does a good job withstanding COD4/5, Assassins Creed, and Crysis at almost the highest settings. not bad for a prebuild that is less than $1500!

CONs: beside the fact that HP doesn't include restore discs, there really aren't any... (you will have to create your own restore discs but HP does provide directions on how to do it. it does take a while!)

Other thoughts: i am currently in the process of bumping the RAM from 4Gb to 8Gb and the HDD from 2x250Gb to 2x500Gb. there is nothing wrong with the speed of the laptop but you can never have enough RAM with 64 bit Vista! the hard drives are just for more storage. i love this laptop. compared this one to the latest Gateway FX and the Dell XPS and for the price of this HP, the other 2 couldn't touch this.

Do yourself a favor and buy this from a site other than HP. the same laptop built thru HP was running higher than $2200 for the exact same setup...

The HP DV7-2040US is a great value. I always multi-task and use some really resource intensive programs. This machine is able to handle it. I had been considering a Quad-Core notebook for some time, but did not want to drop $3,000 $5,000 for bleeding edge technology. HP has a winner here as a platform, however, I have a few caveats. The specs state that it has full screen HD. DO NOT MISTAKE THAT FOR FULL HI-DEF RESOLUTION. You may have to hunt to find the resolution buried in the technical specs, it is only 1600 x 900. This machine does NOT have A single 500GB hard drive, rather, it has two 5400 rpm hard drives. The machine is fast enough that the supplied drives have to labor to keep up. This machine uses DDR2 memory, so you will not get bleeding edge speed, but then again if you want to upgrade to 8GB's of RAM, you should be able to do it for the DDR2 price of less than $300 as of this writing rather than the DDR3 price of $600 $800. As I said, for the money, this is a great value. Lots of processing power, handles graphics and any chore like the workhorse computers from which it is descended.

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I work with computers for a living so i've always built and maintained my own systems but have held off on getting myself a laptop. They've always been too small or slow or both until now. For what I am going to be using it for, it fits me perfectly. I like having dual hard drives (2x250) so I could upgrade to SSD (which I plan to do for even more speed) at a later date. I've upgraded my system from 4GB to 8GB and Vista lasted long enough to get a entire system backup. I then formatted the system and installed Windows 7. No matter how big or fast a laptop you buy, Vista will always seem like a dog when compared to 7 or XP. Installing 7, it loaded most of the important drivers (wireless, lan and video) that is needed to get up and running you will still need to download the rest of the vista drivers for the other odds/ends, but was for the most part painless. I've got OpenOffice and AVG antivirus (both free) installed. Be sure to adjust your power profiles within 7 (or Vista for that matter) to get the performance you want during on or off battery use. Mine out of the box was 'vanilla' and needed ramped up a bit to get full use. Just keep in mind this will change how long your battery will last, if you use it much on battery (which I do not). All in all, the only thing I would change about this laptop is it is a bit too glossy for me. Sure it looks nice and stuff right out of the box, but shows a lot of prints. Also, it can get warm if you lay it on your lap for long periods of time. Not sure if this is the right laptop to take with you on long flights across the country it would probably stick out along the edges of your food tray, not to mention the heft as a carry on. A 15" with a quad core would be nicer if you travel often. I've owned it about a week now and would purchase it again without hesitation.

Tip if you plan to upgrade to 8GB of memory, seach ebay...I bought mine for 225. (8GB 2x4gb) Windows experience under Vista was 5.5 (disks being weakest link), Win 7 was 5.6 (again, disks being weakest link Proc/Ram scored 7.0)

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I got this laptop about 6 hours ago and I have to say, after inspecting and playing with it, I really like this laptop. Sure the frame could be more solid and the because of the 16:9 widescreen, it looks smaller then I imagined a 17.3 inch to look like, but I still really like it.

Now for a couple of bad points. The battery life is awful. I unplugged it and in 10 minutes, the battery went down to 94%, with power-saver ON. It doesn't click closed, it's kind-of like folding a piece of cardboard in half and calling it closed. Right now I find no more negitives.

I love the quad-core. Love the 4gb of mem and the room to add 4 more. Powerful videocard. I love it. I will review more in 2 months and share how it's going.

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I bought this computer because it's the cheapest name-brand quad-core laptop I could find. I'm re-encoding some video into H.264 and need lots of computer power. This HP encodes in 2.5 hours what my 2GHz Pentium M mono-core Dell would do in 23 hours. The laptop puts out a good bit of heat with all four cores cranking away, so it might be too hot to rest on one's lap -best to keep it on a table or desk for the CPU chomping.

The laptop comes with Windows Vista Home. I re-partitioned the hard drives and installed Windows 7 RC1 from the Microsoft website and the 64bit Vista drivers from the HP website. Most drivers work except the for Synaptics -that I had to get from the Synaptics website. The laptop runs flawlessly. Beware that HP doesn't supply the Windows XP drivers for this laptop in case you're thinking of using XP.