You are browsing within the review sections of our forums. Content within these sections reflect consumer opinions of laptops. Our admins take the best and most objective laptop reviews and index them here to create a distinct selection of quality reviews with averaged overall ratings. Many of these reviews have benchmarks attached to them which allows for users to compare their laptop's performance with others, and ultimately enables us to provide a sortable list which at a glance show the fastest laptops amongst a variety of applications (gaming, video editing, web browsing, etc...). Help us build a better laptop database by submitting your laptop review.

I would just like to poke in here... and unfortunately ruin all the fun... I bought this notebook 1 year ago for the same reasons listed above, powerful, 4GB RAM, looks good, etc. However, I've had heat problems the whole time I've owned the laptop. With no way to adjust the fan speeds, THANKS HP!, the cores were originally idling at 70C and maxing out at 90C (processor critical temp (Turion x2) is 95C).

In May I sent it in to HP for a new thermal module. That helped things a little with cores idling at 50C and maxing at 70-75C. The manufacture's warranty was up in July and now in Aug. its broken. I haven't gotten the official word back from my local PC repair (as it is nearly impossible to open this notebook up yourself); but from what I see its a motherboard failure. Here are the symptoms and I'm pretty sure that you'll conclude the same: Press power button, laptop turns on for about 30 sec after being off for several hours then flicks off. Press the power again immediately after, laptop turns on for no more than 10sec and dies. These are the symptoms no matter what you do: go into BIOS, let the laptop boot, etc. In other words, definitely a hardware problem.

I suppose you could say that I should've sent it in sooner to HP for repair, but I'm a college student and it was during the school year and I really couldn't have done without a laptop for a week and a half while it was shipped out to HP in Nevada.

After the repair a limited 90-day warranty is in effect, however HP refuses to repair my laptop because they say it is a different problem then what it was sent in for... which IS true; but the heat issue has caused this problem and for all we know they didn't get the heat issue completely resolved. So I'm not satisfied with HP support...

I am not the first person to have this happen to me, as there is another account of a motherboard failure on Cnet, nor will I be the last. So for all who bought this laptop, I would seriously think about purchasing the extended warranty from HP or where ever you bought it from before the manufacture's warranty runs out.

I guess in addition I should note how I used this notebook. I am not a huge PC gamer... most of my gaming takes place on my Xbox 360 (ironic how it has even faired better than my PC and its one of the RROD models. *knock on wood*). The only game that I ever played on it was Portal on the lowest settings, and even then not very much. No, most of my computing power is dedicated to graphics creation and video editing/rendering.

I enjoyed this computer while it lasted, but I had hoped that it would last longer than a year as I really can't afford to be dropping $800-$900 a year...