Well, to be honest, I had no big extreme high hopes for the HP Pavilion Dv6-3130us Laptop but when I first saw it I was jumping for joy. I got this machine a couple months ago so I can't exactly say in detail what my first thought was but I can tell you this, when I saw the new features of this laptop, I was impressed. Such things that caught my eye was the new touch pad in which HP is incorporating into the Laptop's new designs. Interestingly enough a friend at university saw this laptop and immediately commented saying "it looks alot like a Mac laptop", and it didn't even cross my mind when I first saw it however it seems as though this was the case. A useful lazy tool(I like to call it) this laptop comes with is the fingerprint reader. Instead of typing in all the time the password I have the luxury of just being lazy in my chair, lay back and just swipe my finger to gain access to my desktop, I think that is pretty cool if you ask me. But later down I'll explain in detail what you can expect from this laptop during a few months of usage, as I give you an example of my time with this laptop.
HP Pavilion dv6-3130us Specs
(on my own machine)- 15.6-inch diagonal High-Definition HP BrightView LED display
- Display resolution of 1366×768 pixels
- Powered by an AMD Phenom II N640 2.90GHz dual-core mobile processor
- 4GB of DDR3 RAM and 640GB of SATA hard drive
- ATI mobility Radeon HD 4250 graphics card
- LightScribe technology SuperMulti DVD burner
- TrueVision webcam with integrated digital microphone
- SimplePass with integrated fingerprint reader
- Dolby advanced audio with Altec lansing speakers
- Wireless LAN 802.11b/g/n WLAN(10b) & Bluetooth
- Integrated Gigabit Ethernet LAN 10/100/1000
- 5-in-1 card reader & four USB 2.0
- One HDMI and VGA
- Headphone-out & microphone-in
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit operating system pre-installed
Fingerprint Reader
As I mentioned earlier the fingerprint reader is a nice feature for this laptop. I found the only times I actually use it though, is for logging into the computer. I personally love to get up once my machine is booting up and go and do other stuff. Not that it takes long cause by the time I get up and look around , its at the login screen but if you guys are anything like me, and had ...well...less than optimal machines in the past then you know how it becomes a habit to just push the button and do other things but when I pass by the laptop and I'm not yet finished with what I'm doing I will just swipe my finger and let the programs load up as needed. This handy tool keep me flexible and allows for very quick password logins given the passwords are already within the machine password fingerprint manager.Multi-touch Touchpad
This is pretty impressive technology for me, there is no actual buttons on the touchpad like the older conventional laptops. This touchpad senses where your fingers are, whether its on the left-bottom for left click or right-bottom for right click. This mechanism also makes it possible to sense the presence of more than one point of contact on the surface of the touch pad. This way two fingers going up and down scrolls the page respectively. While two fingers going left or right scrolls the page respectively to the direction of the fingers. This has been pretty useful for me in many documents and PDFs I read. However they are times when i'm scrolling I don't have enough room to move my fingers since I have fair size fingers. Also on occasion I may touch the top left corner more than twice, can't exactly remember why (probably looking for more room...lol) but it would disable the touch pad, which is cool too as it has been in previous HP models in the past. Surprisingly enough, the material they use for the surface of the touch pad is nice and smooth and its very easy to use. Sometimes I stop using my portable mouse just to feel the touch pad. And unlike other touch pads I've experienced, this doesn't get greasy or oily or dirty from the stuff that collects on your hands on a day to day basis and did I mention no fingerprints either. This is pretty awesome in my opinion.
One disappointment I must add at this point.
I don't know if it was just the branch of HP in my country that somehow the HP dealer didn't provide me with a cloth to clean my laptop screen, but I was very disappointed with this, since as a loyal HP customer I've always received my cloth to keep my machine looking clean.
Noticeable Keyboard Change
Now this keyboard has a different design to what I'm accustom to. Now I'm not a Professional Laptop reviewer or anything but I do know what is different and what I do like and don't like on my laptop machine. Now this laptop keyboard comes with (5) five specialise keys from order of bottom to top, calculator, printer, default web browser, hp mediasmart and your default mail application. Now all these keys are useful but I make an effort not to hit keys by accident even though I do sometimes however I've found it annoying sometimes that this laptop keyboard didn't come with a backlight so I can see where my fingers are going at night but I have a bad habit of accidentally hitting the calculator button way to often especially since I'm a programming freak and I also love to use short cut keys combinations. I've found it annoying cause I hit the calculator button when I'm looking for the ctrl key.
I also honestly don't like that they have placed the quick keys with my helpful function keys at the top. So whenever I need to use any function keys like F6 or F8 I need to use the Fn key at the bottom of the keyboard this can be highly annoying if your a frequent user of those keys. But if your not that type of person, then this won't be a problem for you.
However the keys they placed on the left side was a great addition cause I'm all about making things a little easier and this has helped me greatly since I love to multi task and I don't need to stop what I'm doing to locate a browser or mail icon to get to it. I can just hit my dedicated keys on the left of my keyboard and there it is. Thats pretty awesome if you ask me.
Now I must talk about the feel of this laptop. This laptop feels very smooth to the touch cause right now I'm using it and its awesome. I can type and type and type and strangely enough it isn't putting a strain on my fingers. So if you need to type a lot like me like programming a large program or perhaps your a business man/woman who needs a powerful machine to type your reports I do suggest getting this machine.
I also honestly don't like that they have placed the quick keys with my helpful function keys at the top. So whenever I need to use any function keys like F6 or F8 I need to use the Fn key at the bottom of the keyboard this can be highly annoying if your a frequent user of those keys. But if your not that type of person, then this won't be a problem for you.
However the keys they placed on the left side was a great addition cause I'm all about making things a little easier and this has helped me greatly since I love to multi task and I don't need to stop what I'm doing to locate a browser or mail icon to get to it. I can just hit my dedicated keys on the left of my keyboard and there it is. Thats pretty awesome if you ask me.
Now I must talk about the feel of this laptop. This laptop feels very smooth to the touch cause right now I'm using it and its awesome. I can type and type and type and strangely enough it isn't putting a strain on my fingers. So if you need to type a lot like me like programming a large program or perhaps your a business man/woman who needs a powerful machine to type your reports I do suggest getting this machine.
Now the Power!!!!
This machine is amazingly powerful, I have played Need for Speed Shift, Assassin Creed 2: brotherhood, and Call of Duty: Blackops. Now anyone who know these know that they require some good graphic cards to work with and a decent processor to be able to calculate all the physics involved in the games. But this laptop did justice to these games and I've had no problem in installing and playing these games on this machine.And of course you may be wondering like me when I'm looking for a machine to purchase how often does it heat up. Especially since this is an AMD machine and I do know from experience that AMD processors do give out a good set of heat. But in this, the laptop that HP designed was built in such a way to divert the heat right out of the machine. I think this is an AWESOMEEEEEE addition to the series of HP laptops. This way the heat will not burn your hand when your typing and will not damage you CD/DVD drive while its on. From my own personal use I've found this to be very good for my laptop. Most of the machine does be cold after long hours of it being on, the only place that is warm would be where the processor fan is.
And with 4GB of RAM memory available at the start and be able to expend to 8GB I believe this is awesome for gamers and multi task users like myself. I tend to have many window browsers open and high resource demand programs running at once, but not once has this machine halt, or stall due to this load with 4GB of memory for RAM. With a more than 600 GBs of main memory to use, you can place, store programs there for as long as you wish.
Battery Life
I can't really say much about the battery other than the fact that it is AWESOME!!!!!!! :). This laptop can be on for 4-5 hours without needing to be charged. As default, it came with a 6-cell battery so just imagine what a 12-cell battery can do for you with this machine. All you need to do is optimize the machine so when its on battery power it minimizes it need to perform at its best. For example, dim the brightness of the screen, close off as many application as you don't need to be running.I even found out that bitdefender has this great ability to detect if the machine is running on battery or by power cord. So if possible set your anti-virus or internet security to lower its power drain if possible. Bitdefender Total Security 2011 is great with my laptop, I'm not changing this security no matter if I change to another machine or not. So if you ever need an Anti virus or some internet security program I sugeest you get bitdefender, it scans everything!!!!!!!!!!. Every flash drive, CD or DVD place into this machine, even when I'm downloading a file it checks it and before the download is complete it can find a virus during the download and alert you to it. This has protect me against some nasty programs and I suggest this to anyone.
Could this be the Computer For You?
In conclusion, This HP Pavilion Dv6-3130us Laptop is fairly great. I'm sure there are others out there that are great as well but right now, I am happy with this machine, and with its recovery abilities and its automation updates and new built-in BIOS system, I have no complaints. I am an HP customer and a loyal one at that and I suggest if you are reading this for any indication of a good laptop to buy, I would suggest looking at this one HP Pavilion dv6-3230us Entertainment Laptop (Silver)
. Hope you enjoy whatever machine you have and decide to have as your best friend in the near future.Here are some other HP Pavilion Products available :
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