» Price: $3,099 » Available: From authorised HP dealers
IT IS easy to like HP's dv7 entertainment notebook.
With its stylish aircraft-aluminium design, superior processing power and value-for-money price tag, the dv7 is something I would consider buying for my family's home entertainment needs.
HP designed this machine around the latest Intel Centrino 2 technology that promises a good balance between processing power and battery life.
Hardware in this notebook is mostly top of the line: At the heart is a high-end Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz processor with 3GB RAM (expandable to 8GB DDR2 SDRAM). Its large 17-inch widescreen display can display the highest resolution of 1,440 x 900 pixels.
Trust me, I got a kick out of watching Return Of The King on the dv7's big screen compared to watching the same movie on my Toshiba M300 with its puny 14.1-inch screen.
With these high-end specifications, performance is excellent. It scored 240 points on the MobileMark 2007 performance benchtest.
HP also equipped the dv7 with an Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics chipset with 512MB video memory.
With this firepower, the dv7 runs graphics-intensive games like Call Of Duty 4 smooth as silk. Its high score of 4,523 points on the 3DMark06 graphics benchtest is not surprising.
What is equally important is the superior audio hardware: the dv7 comes with Altec Lansing speakers with integrated sub-woofer supported by a 3D Sound Blaster Pro compatible 16-bit integrated audio processor. At full volume, the sound of exploding grenades and the rattle of machine gun fire in Call Of Duty 4 was enough to wake my napping spouse.
HP ships this notebook with lots of ports and slots. Highlights include four USB ports - enough for external devices like a printer, an external hard drive and digital camera. It even has a FireWire slot for digital video transfer and a high-definition multimedia interface port for super-clear high-definition videos.
Bonuses include a built-in TV tuner that lets you tap into the TV aerial to catch free-to-air TV programmes, say, on Channel 5 and Okto. For couch potatoes, HP ships the notebook with a remote control so you can switch TV channels from the comfort of your sofa.
There is also a Blue-ray DVD burner and a full-sized keyboard with an added numeric keypad.
The excellent software bundle complements the hardware package. You get useful features like a recovery partition (so it is possible to recover system, applications and drivers separately), a recovery CD/DVD creation tool and Symantec Norton Internet Security 2008.
At 3.5kg, the bulky monster, that takes up the space of an A3 sheet of paper, is not the type of notebook you will lug around on your travels.
Final say
The dv7 makes for a mean multimedia machine for watching movies and playing games at home.
By Adli Yashir, a correspondent and Internet coordinator with Berita Harian.
This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on 17 December 2008.
