I bought this model laptop in December of 2008.HP has come a long way, and they are making terrific laptops these days (as compared to the 1990's). At a given price point for an HP model, you will pay more for a competitor's laptop with the same features.
PROS:
* Excellent screen resolution. If you get the nVidia 512Mb video card, it's even better.
* Included components like DVD drive and hard disk are all very good quality.
* Great quality keyboard, with quiet touch action.
* Finger-touch media controls at top are useful.
* Very attractive looking color scheme, rather conservative relative to the flashy designs HP has come out with today.
* HP released a lot of minor model variations based on the DV5, so replacement parts are fairly easy to obtain (and quite cheap on "that auction site").
* Although my left touch pad key eventually became lose (see below), it hasn't experienced any functional failures in my over 2 years of ownership. I've heard a lot of good things about HP reliability, so don't bother with any pricey extended warranties.
CONS:
* Touch pad keys are fragile. The left one gets used the most and the silver coating will eventually rub off. What's worse is that the button alignment will fatigue and the button becomes loose. This will happen if you do not use an external mouse. I strong suggest getting one. I bought a replacement palmrest part, because the touch pad is integrated into it, and it was VERY tricky installing it. You take apart practically the whole laptop, save the monitor. Sufficiently detailed instructions can be found on-line, so the process is doable (in about 2 hours).
* The semi-gloss palmrest helps diminish the contrast of fingerprints, but they are still prevalent. Same is true for the lid top. My solution for this was to get a "second skin" slim case with microfiber keyboard cover that you can use to wipe down prints. This works well as my laptop still looks new, and it's thin enough to still slide the laptop into a case.
* The battery life is a little below average. The duo core processor and high capacity graphics card suck up resources. You won't get more than 2.5 hours per charge, and that's with conserving the screen brightness.
* The power cord doesn't have a tension pull-away feature, so you can totally mangle it if you trip over the cord.
* Windows Vista Home Premium with SP2 is actually a pretty good operating system, but there are some minor quirks. One is that when the laptop comes out of standby mode, it won't recognize the fingerprint reader for about 5-10 seconds, then it'll see it and function properly.
* Mimicry is the greatest form of flattery, and HP imitated Apple by providing a brightly lit logo on the back of the lid. It's really quite bright, though at least it is in the lower left corner of the lid. Worse come to worse, you could always place a dark sticker over it.
* When in standby, a very bright white LED will flash... so in a dark bedroom, it will be distracting (you have to cover it with something).
I went by Best Buy recently and checked out the latest laptop offerings. The available variety of models is quite numerous in the under $1000 price bracket. I would only get this laptop if you could find it for under $700... but not at the over $900 price currently showing. I bought mine for $845 shipped in 12/08, from a discount website.
0 comments:
Post a Comment