6 replies to this topic

[mike.]

Annoyingly my toshiba A300D laptop has just broke - Was a nice laptop really but the problem with it is going to cost me a fair bit to repair (over £100 anyway) and the laptops 3 years old now anyway.

As I wasn't really expecting it to break i've not really got any money saved at the moment so whatever I get is going to have to be fairly cheap but looking at current laptop specs I can get a better laptop than the toshiba for about half the price now.

I could get something like these below which seem to look pretty basic and boring, but have a good spec for the money with 3-4gb ram, big hard drives and decent processors for about £300-£350: HP G56 Link and HP G62 Link

I was thinking though that I might get a bit bored of such a bland looking laptop and found this instead which is £450 similar spec but with a better processor and a nice design: HP Pavillion DV6

At £450 that would be a stretch and I would probably have to wait till my birthday to afford that but if I like it enough i'd wait.

However I want something smaller and more mobile really but as soon as you look at 13" laptops the price shoots right up to £600-700 for a similar spec, so its not really worth it and netbooks have a maximum of 2gb ram and around 1.2ghz processors so would be too slow to use as my only laptop.

But then I found the HP DM1 which is 11.6" screen so about the size of A4 paper, but still big enough to have a full size keyboard and widescreen 1366x768 resolution, it looks really nice, has 3gb ram, 320gb harddrive, and only weighs 1.6kg and is just over 20mm thick. I've been looking at reviews and watching video reviews on youtube and it all seems good so far: HP DM1

The only downfall about it is the processor which although is some fancy new AMD technology its only 1.6ghz, so isn't that fast really - But i'm wondering if anyone whos really clued up on computers could tell me anymore about it to use as my only laptop. Because I only really use my laptop for multitab web browsing, my itunes is never really turned off and I might have microsoft office open at the same time aswell as my computer etc but nothing major - Do you think that processor would struggle with that at all?

At the moment i'm using my mums laptop which is 1.6ghz processor and 2gb DDR2 ram and its not really struggled with any of my normal use over the last week, so i'm thinking since the HP is better than this with better ram and a more up to date processor it'll easily cope with what i'm doing and theres videos on youtube of it playing HD movies and streaming 1080p off youtube really well and even playing some pretty demanding games with out too much glitchyness.

The only thing holding me back buying it is that processor, but like I say i'm not sure it'll even be a problem for what I normally use my laptop for. What would it be like with more demanding software such as CAD?

Thanks for any advice

[Ethel]

It'll probably be faster than your mum's, architecture will have improved.
It sounds like it might be one of the energy efficient Athlons so the slower speed will be a trade off to better battery life. Give your mum's lappy a workout with your power hungry programmes and some benchmarking software running in the background - see how often it actually max's out the processor.

[mike.]

Yeah it is, HP reckon that DM1 can get 10 hours battery life! Although in most reviews people were getting more like 6 or maybe 7 with screen brightness turned down.

Good idea about testing my mums laptop out, I might install CAD or 3DS max on it and see how it goes. Any ideas what benchmarking programmes I can get?

On this review I watched they've got some CPU and RAM usage metre and also a frames per second counter so you can see how it performs whilst watching videos and games. Any idea what they're using on this:

lsnSATGW8Wc

[mike.]

Well I just downloaded the all CPU metre for vista like they have on the video above and just did some basic browsing tests and my mums laptop here didn't cope very well at all! I had 3 tabs open, a forum in one and 2 HD videos on youtube in the other 2, one video was playing the other was just loading and the CPU pretty much maxed out and was using a constant 85-90% and 65% ram, even hit 100% CPU usage a couple of times and the video started skipping! Sat here now with TMF open writing this post its using around 15% CPU.

So basically my mums laptop here which is a 1.6ghz dual core intel processor and 2gb DDR2 ram was getting redlined by a couple of HD video tabs

Although i'm not sure if that was a fair test of how that HP DM1 would perform because vista takes about half the ram just to run it. On my toshiba laptop it was loads faster after I switched to windows 7 as opposed to vista and also the processor on the HP is one of the newest offerings from AMD.

Still not filling me with confidence though...

[mike.]

Also watching that review video above that I posted in 1080p HD leaves this laptop with the CPU almost maxed out sitting between 95-99%!

[kazza0320]

i'm always a bit skeptical about HP laptops now that i have owned one. The one that i owned was the G6000 and it has had heat and battery problems about a year and a half after i brought it. The battery is now fully dead (holds no charge) and it overheats after 10-20 mins of use. These problems are common with HP laptops apparently (3 of my friends that have also had HP's have had the same faults) and are due to poor design (storing the gpu and cpu close together producing lots of heat) and the fact that HP spend minimal amounts on the thermal paste and fan system.

This is just mine and my friends experiences with the HP laptops and you may have better luck but i have completely gone off HP's and will probably not buy one ever again.

[daveholman]

I have previously owned a HP Pavillion DV8000 and now own a HP Pavillion DV6000.

I used the 8000 for about 4 years predominantly when I was working away and living on building sites, it took a fair beating in that time and the only reason I upgraded is that the harddrive failed and there was an issue with the touch pad so it didn't seem worth continuing with it.


My 6000 has been a good computer, my only complaint is that the mouse pad is a little tricky to get used to, it sometimes doesn't do what you want it to or will do things on it's own! I run a multitude of programs on my 6000 including Photoshop, Premier Pro and Autodesk 3DS Max. I've put it under a fair amount of pressure, rendering sequences in HD on Premier Pro and have seen no problems at all really.

One thing I've noticed is that you need to ensure that if you're running high performance programs the air vents on the side and base of the machine need to be completely clear. I've seen this on both the 8000 and the 6000. The 8000 was so clogged up with dust that the air flow was severely limited and I've found that if I use my 6000 on my bed and the vents are blocked by the sheets there are issues with overheating. I've had the same problems on a Dell Inspiron though so this isn't limited to HP.