Dell laptops used to be the ones the school district that I work for went with but recently HP has given us better prices and better products and so when we ordered new laptops for the district we went with the HP Pavilion dv6000t. It’s a nice laptop with great design features, decent processor performance, two headphone jacks and a built in webcam. All of these factors and the price that HP gave us on a bulk buy of these laptops helped us choose this HP.
The HP Pavilion line of laptops are pretty similar, all have a nice sleek design with a shiny finish. It’s not just a good looking laptop though it also has solid entertainment features and high-end components for a decent price. This laptop isn’t going to set any records in performance but the features make it a good buy. This laptop is great for anyone who wants to use their laptop for multimedia entertainment and doesn’t mind a battery that isn’t going to last forever. It works perfect for all of your basic needs and all of your audio visual desires.
The technical side of the DV6000 it measures 14 inches wide, 1 inch thick and 10.1 inches deep not any bigger than other laptops in its class. The aspect that sets the DV6000 apart from the rest of the laptops in its class is that its only 6.2 pounds making it lighter than similar laptops.
The HP Pavilion dv6000 has a nice sized screen (15.4 inches, with a wide screen display) it has a screen resolution of 1,280×800 pixels and provides plenty of room for all of your display needs. The screen has a glossy finish which I didn’t really like but it has a crystal clear look and really makes colors vibrant. The glossy finish can cause a glare if there is sunlight coming through a window or you are working outside, this is annoying but you can always buy the dv6000 without the glossy finish if you want. Another cool feature of the dv6000 is the 1.3 mega-pixel webcam that is built into the screen; this can be used for fun or in video conferencing. The webcam combined with two built-in microphones make it a perfect way to chat with friends or have video phone calls.
The HP Pavilion series of laptops always has the row of lighted tough buttons at the top of the keyboard and the dv6000 of course has a set of these cool controls. These buttons control the volume of your sound and also have a media player launch button. The keys are backlit with a soft blue light that looks nice with the color of the laptop, there is a beep that announces when you press a button and it can get annoying, and disabling the sound is very complicated. The overall sound from the Altec Lansing speakers is average and if you close the laptop lid the sound is muffled.
The dv6000’s keyboard is plenty big for when you are spending a lot of time typing and the mouse touch pad has an on/off button so you don’t accidentally misplacing your cursor. I love that the mouse pad has the on/off button but I don’t like the finish on the mouse pad, it seems sticky and it gets quite hot. The left and right click buttons are also small and I would prefer they be a little larger but overall the mouse pad and buttons are usable.
The HP Pavilion dv6000 has a few ports for adding on additional components, it doesn’t have a lot but it compares with others in its class. The ports include an S-Video, VGA, FireWire, and three USB 2.0 ports, and a microphone jack and of course dual headphone jacks incase you want to share movies with friends.
Another useful feature on the dv6000 is the card slots that read the latest ExpressCards, Plus Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and XD formats. So you don’t have to worry too much about transferring your digital pictures from your camera to you laptop you can do it with ease with the slots. The laptop also comes standard with Ethernet, modem, and 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi; with Bluetooth as an available option if you choose it. You also get a dual layer DVD burner and include LightScribe technology, which allows you to burn your own labels onto LightScribe disks.
The internals of the dv6000 include a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 chip with a gig of fast 667MHz RAM, 100 gig hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce Go 7500 graphics card. All of this and the system only cost $1,539 not to bad of a deal when compared to other similar laptops.
The system has plenty of power for most applications and works well when I used more than one heavy duty program at a time. I ran Photoshop CS, Fireworks, and Flash all at the same time while listening to music and didn’t have a problem performing my work. I don’t think this would be a great laptop for heavy duty gaming but it works if you just want to play music watch DVD’s or surf the net and always know that you have the extra resources if you need to use some heavy duty programs.
The HP Pavilion dv6000 comes with a standard 1 year warranty and for just $185 dollars you can get that extended up to 3 years. Overall a good buy for the price and a great computer with exceptional performance, I suggest if you do get the laptop upgrade to Windows Media Center and it will make the laptop that much more useful.
