Hewlett Packard Pavilion Dv6500t (RM098AV) PC Notebook
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Love it, even though I hated it as much.
Pros
15.4 inch brightview screen, nice design, good feature set, available accessories.
Cons
Poor hinge design, Vista is horrible out of the box, shiny finish.
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Yes, I do recommend this laptop, however, for the $, one can buy a much better laptop these days.
I got my dv6500t as a gift, so my initial expression was, wow! After 4 months of using it, I am still sort in the phase of wow! This little machine can do much that I cut down using my desktop. My laptop came with following config,
T7250 core 2 Duo processor (2GHz, 2MB L2 cache)
2GB (1X1GB) RAM
120 GB 5400rpm SATA-I hard drive
DVD writer
3 USB ports, one mini-firewire port, one HDMI out, one VGA out, one port for external port replicator, port for lan and modem as well as a port for multiple media card reader (xD, MMC, SD, memory stick/pro).
Unlike most laptops it has two audio out port. One of them, if necessary, can act as digital audio out port, which I am yet to test.
Plus, every possible accessories available with this model, such as stereo headphone, webcam, tv-tuner, remote etc.
The workmanship is really nice from the external design of the laptop- top has some shiny special finish which I have never seen before. HP touts it as "imprint" finish. Screen section is black in color with a very glossy finish. Which, while look great, gets really murky after some use. keyboard section is made of shiny silver plastic, with imprint finish.
While initial impression was great from the physical look of it, I was barely patient after using the laptop, with much blame to Vista Ultimate (64bit). The laptop was as slow as a P3 decade old desktop. I read in web forums that vista behaves just like that initially, since it index files initially, eating system juice continuously. Another thing, that annoyed me was the lack of a real system installation media. HP and many other PC makers decided to charge consumer's time to burn recovery discs, which would have cost the manufacturers few cents, may be couple of dimes. It took me 1 hour to burn two DVDs, which will be your only "recovery disc" [PLEASE, do this first before you mess up with your computer]. Recovery Manager allows you to burn recovery media only once; however there is trick available which will let you burn any number of recovery disc you want (google hpcd.sys). There are some doubts regarding the reliability of the recovery discs and recovery manager software that HP use, however it worked flawlessly, twice for me.
Like most other consumer laptop makers, HP was very generous to load the laptop with bloatware/trialware junk. So, after creating recovery dvds, all crapware was deleted, which while takes some time, speed up the system significantly. However, to my surprise, the laptop was till sluggish and new update/upgrade to SP1 did not solve the unresponsiveness of the laptop. A final surgery was done (A must read folks http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532) to improve the system performance and believe it or not- my laptop is now as responsive as a new robust desktop. Thanks to Vista Media Center and supplied tuner card, now I can watch Discovery Channel and type the review and check my Outlook email without a hitch. Since my laptop came with a Nvidia 8400M card, watching DVD is flawless, so is some gaming, since the speakers are better than average too. Battery seems to power it up for ~ 2.5 hrs with low screen brightness. Overall, I am pretty happy with my laptop.
T7250 core 2 Duo processor (2GHz, 2MB L2 cache)
2GB (1X1GB) RAM
120 GB 5400rpm SATA-I hard drive
DVD writer
3 USB ports, one mini-firewire port, one HDMI out, one VGA out, one port for external port replicator, port for lan and modem as well as a port for multiple media card reader (xD, MMC, SD, memory stick/pro).
Unlike most laptops it has two audio out port. One of them, if necessary, can act as digital audio out port, which I am yet to test.
Plus, every possible accessories available with this model, such as stereo headphone, webcam, tv-tuner, remote etc.
The workmanship is really nice from the external design of the laptop- top has some shiny special finish which I have never seen before. HP touts it as "imprint" finish. Screen section is black in color with a very glossy finish. Which, while look great, gets really murky after some use. keyboard section is made of shiny silver plastic, with imprint finish.
While initial impression was great from the physical look of it, I was barely patient after using the laptop, with much blame to Vista Ultimate (64bit). The laptop was as slow as a P3 decade old desktop. I read in web forums that vista behaves just like that initially, since it index files initially, eating system juice continuously. Another thing, that annoyed me was the lack of a real system installation media. HP and many other PC makers decided to charge consumer's time to burn recovery discs, which would have cost the manufacturers few cents, may be couple of dimes. It took me 1 hour to burn two DVDs, which will be your only "recovery disc" [PLEASE, do this first before you mess up with your computer]. Recovery Manager allows you to burn recovery media only once; however there is trick available which will let you burn any number of recovery disc you want (google hpcd.sys). There are some doubts regarding the reliability of the recovery discs and recovery manager software that HP use, however it worked flawlessly, twice for me.
Like most other consumer laptop makers, HP was very generous to load the laptop with bloatware/trialware junk. So, after creating recovery dvds, all crapware was deleted, which while takes some time, speed up the system significantly. However, to my surprise, the laptop was till sluggish and new update/upgrade to SP1 did not solve the unresponsiveness of the laptop. A final surgery was done (A must read folks http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532) to improve the system performance and believe it or not- my laptop is now as responsive as a new robust desktop. Thanks to Vista Media Center and supplied tuner card, now I can watch Discovery Channel and type the review and check my Outlook email without a hitch. Since my laptop came with a Nvidia 8400M card, watching DVD is flawless, so is some gaming, since the speakers are better than average too. Battery seems to power it up for ~ 2.5 hrs with low screen brightness. Overall, I am pretty happy with my laptop.
