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HP Pavillion DV6625US

This is a budget notebook well-suited for general use, except for serious gaming, with an emphasis on media. In fact, it is called their "entertainment" series. As such, the Quick Play feature, better than average speakers (for a notebook), dual headphone jacks, and built in web cam w/mike all attest to this.

The HP "Imprint" styling is nice, if you are weary of the "industrial-putty" look of many notebooks, and is a bit unusual, as there is no "latch" when you close it.

With the 15.4" widescreen design, there is room for a good-sized, well-laid out keyboard. I find this a better than average keyboard both in size/key layout, and tactile response, however, it is just a little noisy, but not overly so.

The touchpad is certainly generous, a "wide-body" design, and can be turned on and off conveniently. Unlike most touchpads, it has a very "slick" feel...some will like this, some will not. I am not a real big touchpad user anyways, I always end up using a wireless mouse.

The 15.4 Brightview screen has a native resolution of 1280x800, not as high a resolution as some, but, on the other hand, I find this a comfortable resolution in terms of having decent readability (fonts not being too small). This is purely subjective, but I find the colors vibrant, good brightness, and overall a pleasant enough display.

I like the layout of the ports, with everything being on the sides, no connections being in the back. There are the normal 3 usb ports/1 firewire/Express Card slot etc., the only video out is a T.V. out S-video and a vga port. There are dual headphone-out jacks in the front (centered), and the wireless switch is also on the left side of the front.

The DVD Writer, a Lightscribe enabled model, works well enough, not overly loud, but not a "HD" drive.

This comes with Vista Home Premium installed, and the obligatory recovery partition, which one should record recovery cd/dvds right after initial set up...speaking of which...one of my few "complaints" is that the initial setup really does take a good bit longer than I would have anticipated! Not that anything was difficult...just time-consuming!

I immediately upgraded to 2gb, as for Vista, this is really a better set up. There is a question in that HP claims that the dv6625us can be expanded to 4gb, HP's own built in support says a max of 2gb...still not sure about that!

As with most computers (notebook or desktop), there is the pre-laoded "bonus" software to register, or dump...most of that I dump, but really HP has less crap-ware than many...

Initially, boot-up was definitely "laggy", and getting rid of some of the "extras" certainly helped. It also may be a matter of Vista Superfetch "fine tuning" over usage, but at any rate, boot time now is actually quite decent.

The Nvidia 7150M is an integrated graphics solution, and as such, no gaming powerhouse , however, it is fine running the Aero interface, running videos/dvds, and actually can get you through some basic gaming as long as you don't go crazy on the eye candy.

The Broadcom wireless is b/g, not "N" but within that, it seems to have very acceptable range, and I had no problems at all integrating this into my wireless network with XP and Vista machines.

Battery life is so-so...not terrible, but nothing to write home about. I get anywhere from just 2 hours to almost 3 hours depending on usage, but not disappointing for a "standard" battery in a budget machine.

The notebook runs fairly cool...I was worried that the turion might run a bit warm, but I do not find that to be the case at all, the hard drive is very quiet, and fan noise is not bad at all.

I am pleased with the performance of the 1.9ghz Turion 58-TL. While no powerhouse cpu, it runs Vista smoothly, and appears to be a good solution in this price range. Everything runs with good "snap" and short of really demanding applications, this should be plenty enough cpu for most users.

Overall, I find this to be a reasonably fast, convenient notebook, well-built (though not a "rugged" notebook!), intelligently laid-out, and even "stylish". It really seems to set a "high end" as a budget priced laptop. It is a good Vista vehicle, however, if you purchase it with 1gb ram, I do recommend upgrading to 2gb.