I am sure many readers of this blog are the person the family turns to to sort out problems with virus or installing updates and I have that roll in our family. My latest family job was to unbox and setup a notebook, the notebook that I got to setup was a HP DV6 powered by AMD Athlon II P340 Dual-Core Processor running at 2.20 GHz with 4GB RAM. As you can see from the pictures the notebook is a kind of bright red colour (HP call it Sonoma Red)
The setup process is customized from the standard Windows setup but nice and simple, it does ask you to register and it wants you to install a Norton anti-virus trial which I never install. Even after declining the install it still installed a nagware program that need removing so it would stop asking for Norton to be installed. I always install Microsoft Security Essentials, its free, lightweight and does that job well. There is lots of HP specific application pre-installing like HP’ Magic Desktop and Hp Toolbar which it could do without.
One disappointment is that the HP didn’t pre-install service pack 1 on the notebook so there were 73 updates to do before I even started. I would normally just do a clean install but seeing as its not my notebook I thought it would be quicker to just do the updates but it probably wasn’t.
In terms of performance the Windows Experience Index is 5.0 and with 4GB of RAM it feels pretty snappy, its not a rocket machine but at £390 its reasonably priced. It comes with a AMD’s Mobile Radeon HD 4250 which I haven’t tried with any games but was fine for HD video and the display is 15.6 inch which is clear and bright (HP BrightView). The sound comes from Altec-Lansing speakers and Dolby Advanced Audio and is pretty good but not particularly loud but then it weights in at 2.4 Kg so its just about what you would expect from a notebook of this size.
In terms of ports there are 4 USB ports, e-sata, HDMI, network and card reader. There is also a Lighscribe DVD writer (I am not sure how much use the Lightscribe would get) webcam and multi-touch trackpad which works ok but isn’t as nice as my Macbook Air’s pad.
I haven’t spent a lot of time with the notebook but if your after a low cost machine that has some nice enteraiment features this could be a good option, the screen is nice and for Media Center use it would be pretty good notebook. If you have any other questions about the device let me know
This model was on offer at £390 from Currys and is available on Amazon at £539
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