Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Now that I've had this computer for a few months, I'd like to modify my review. This computer has randomly shut down about 10 times now, a dozen blue screens of death related to USB 3. I'm sure these are either hardware or driver related and rescind my recommendation for this machine.
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This is a very fast laptop. I'm a computer programmer that needs a very fast machine for pretty much everything I do, and this laptop is awesome.
This machine as it is listed has great upgraded options, like the best resolution screen, blu-ray, extra battery, and extra RAM, however, the hard drive it comes with is very slow. This laptop does have a 2nd hard drive bay and I bought the 225$ 128GB Kingston SSD, made it my primary drive, then made the original drive my secondary drive. To do this was no small task, but here's the steps to take:
Warning: I have no idea if this does or does not void your warranty, I can't find a clear answer to that.
1. Order this laptop
2. Order an SSD ($225-$250 for 128GB, or $360-$400 for 160GB)
3. Order a hard drive caddy and cable kit. HP sells it for 91$ after taxes and shipping, but you can get it for 41$ from newmodeus.com. [...]
And by the way HP, I think that it's awful that the laptop didn't come with this in the first place. $41 for just a 3" cable is robbery and the $91 that you charge is two robberies and a beating.
4. If you get a SATA hard drive enclosure, things will be easier because you can connect the drives to the eSata port. Otherwise you will need to install the ssd to the 2nd hard drive bay, do the clone, then switch them so the SSD is in the first bay. Note: HP does NOT give you the windows 7 installation DVD, so the first thing you should do is make recovery DVDs through their utility. But also know that you can't use these DVDs to set up a new drive because they won't create the special boot partition HP uses. (I learned this the hard way)
5. Resize the original drive's partitions so they are altogether small enough to fit on the new drive. (And be sure to move them so the unpartitioned space is at the end) Easeus partition manager is by far the easiest way to do this, and you will need its boot cd it makes later, so I'd suggest buying the pro version and save yourself a headache or two.
6. Use either clonezilla (free) or Easeus partition manager pro ($40) to create a boot disk and clone the old drive to the new one. I used clonezilla, but Easeus is a lot easier.
7. After confirming the new drive works and is in bay 1, you'll notice the old drive is "Offline", meaning Windows can't use it. You will need to delete all of its partitions, create a primary partition and format it with NTFS in order to make it work. Use the Easeus professional boot disk to do this. Then when you boot Windows, go to disk management, right click the drive and select "Online" to make it Online, whatever that means.
Also note that the back panel to change the hard drives on this laptop was (at least for me) incredibly difficult to remove. I felt like I was surely going to break it with the force it took to pry it off. I've had several laptops in the past, and this one is the first one that I've had any difficulty replacing the hard drive. It's also the first one I've had with two hard drive bays.
So it's definitely a lot of work to get a faster hard drive in there and may be more trouble than it's worth, but in my opinion, buying a high-end laptop at this time without a solid state drive is foolish. So either find a different laptop that has an SSD, order this laptop customized from hp.com (considerably more expensive) to include an SSD, or stepping down to a more economy line laptop would all be better options than not having one.
Gaming
Did I mention that this laptop is good for gaming? The 1GB ATI Mobility 5850 is one of the fastest mobile graphics cards at the time of this review. If you want a faster gaming machine, you either have to spend over $3000 for a better gaming laptop, or get a desktop. This graphics card puts this machine on par for gaming with modern mid-range desktops, which is saying a lot for a laptop. It also allows you to have up to 3 external monitors. (Display port, VGA, and HDMI). However, I do have a problem with League of Legends crashing when using a 1920x1280 monitor through the display port. That is likely just the game, but who knows. It works fine with the VGA port.
Beats Audio
The Beats audio does not live up to the hype. I find the built in speakers to be rather crummy in my opinion. Previous reviews say "Good, for a laptop". I would add, "very slightly above average laptop speakers". The sound card is good, it sounds great with external bose speakers or headphones, but the laptop speakers suck. In fact, it took a lot of configuring to get them to not sound completely broken.
Screen
The display is better than any other laptop I've seen. It's at least equal to high-end macbook pros. It looks perfect from any angle, has great resolution, and is attached by sturdy metal hinges.
Keyboard and mouse
The keyboard is awesome, but I hate the touchpad. I love how it's the back-lit, island style keyboard. The numpad is great to have, the keys are all in the right spot and size. I'm always amazed at how few laptops or even external keyboards get it right.
The touchpad, on the other hand, is awful. I don't think I'll ever get used to it. I can't even drag things with it. I don't know if I'm just "doing it wrong", but it is literally impossible to use. I don't like touchpads in general, I prefer Lenovo button mice, but this one is particularly terrible. I can overlook this huge flaw in a laptop by always using an external mouse.
Connections
Awesome, Mini display port, hdmi, vga, eSata, usb 3, blu-tooth, wireless n, gigabit ethernet. All awesome. One thing though, instead of a microphone jack, it's a "headset" jack? I can't seem to use it as a microphone port either. This confuses me..
Power Supply
It's huge. But what do you expect? Big computer, big power supply.
HD Camera and microphone
Works fine, good for my uses, but not as good as I hoped it would be. The built in microphone sounds great.
Software
HP didn't go overboard with pre-installed software like it did with the last HP I bought, and Windows 7 is great. The partitioning of the drives is weird and the HP recovery software isn't very good. It doesn't come with windows disks, so again, be sure to immediately create the recovery disks.
Other
This laptop has no docking station options. This alone was almost reason enough to go with Dell or Lenovo, but neither of those were as good for gaming at the same price, nor did they match up in many other areas.
Bottom line, this is a power hungry, fast, big laptop. A great desktop replacement, but doesn't have the mobility or battery life as some people might like.
I hope this helps people, and doesn't utterly confuse everyone.
Targus XL Backpack Designed for 17 Inch Notebooks TXL617 (Black with Blue Accents)
Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB SATA II 3GB/s 2.5 Inch Solid State Drive SV100S2/128GZ
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