HP pavilion dv9000 review

This notebook is available with the shiny piano black glossy type HP pavilion dv9000 battery custom finish, as well as the oldschool rough plastic type. The pavilion dv9000 notebook price ranges from usually around $500USD to anywhere in the area of $2000USD being that it is a CTO.

The build quality of this pavilion dv9000 battery notebook is great, it’s solid and sturdy. The LCD hinges give little if any flex while opening and closing with ease. There is a little rippling on the LCD when the top bezel is pressed with some force, but I’ve seen much worse. The touchpad works amazingly well, however the buttons are somewhat flimsy and feel cheap, though this doesn’t matter if you use an external mouse most of the time. There are an abundance of input and output connections on this notebook. It’s somewhat strange however they are all on the sides, with the exception of the headphone jacks in front. Most notebooks tend to have some ports on the back, the headphone jacks in the front do get quite annoying when hooking a stereo or surround sound into them. Possibly one of my favorite features on this notebook happens to be the media card slot. Not many hp pavilion dv3000 battery notebooks have integrated media card readers; this is definitely a plus for avid digital photographers.

I believe this notebook pavilion dv3000 battery would fall somewhere in between a desktop replacement and portable. I wouldn’t take this notebook mountain climbing or throw it out of a window like some have claimed to do with the pavilion dv5000, however for the everyday person, bringing this to school; work or whatnot is pretty easy. Weighing in at about 6 pounds this isn’t super light but at the same time, it’s not quite as heavy as the all around desktop replacements that I’ve seen. Though, keep in mind that with a 12-Cell Lithium-Ion pavilion dv9000 battery and AC adapter this notebook would weigh somewhere around 8 pounds which isn’t fun to carry around all day.

HP dv9000 bottom view

Audio:

This dv9000 battery notebook comes equipped with Altec Lansing stereo speakers which are located in between the LCD bottom and the one touch buttons. I was quite impressed with the quality of sound that these can blast out. When using Cyberlink PowerDVD to boost the volume they get somewhat distorted however. With my older notebooks I found myself plugging in my surround sound speakers a lot more than I do with this model.

Screen:

HP dv9000 front view

Probably the most important feature when buying a hp pavlilion dv9000 battery and hp pavilion dv3000 battery laptop is having a good screen. If you’re going to be staring at it for thousands of hours it might as well be comfortable to look at. I received this laptop with an LG Philips 1280x800 WXGA Hi-Definition Brightview Widescreen with no dead pixels. I can easily say this is the nicest LCD I have ever owned. The screen has a very crisp picture, and no light leakage whatsoever. Viewing angles from the left and right are perfect, and do not look washed out. Vertical viewing angles however sometimes can be washed out when viewing from too far away. Using the included software you can customize your LCD’s color to your liking with the Nvidia Settings Manager tool which I thought was a plus.

Graphics:

Windows Vista ran well on the dv9000

I chose the hp pavilion dv5000 Series GPU for this pavilion dv5000 battery and pavilion dv3000 battery notebook. This is the best available graphics chip for this model notebook. It seems to perform very well for average use and can play most new games at medium settings. The 128MB of shared “turbocache” doesn’t slow this PC down at all and it runs Vista Aero very smoothly. Most people considering this notebook seem to be worried about having enough graphics power for Vista which I did as well. After running Windows Vista Enterprise Edition for about two weeks I can safely say that it was a very nice experience (visually) and there were no quirks with the graphics processor. I had to use modded .inf files as the official Nvidia drivers aren’t out yet, however it still ran better that I had thought it would. Windows Vista seemed to actually run faster than XP Professional even with all the Aero features enabled. Another good benchmark test for the Go 7400 is F.E.A.R. which I play quite a bit. F.E.A.R. seems to run best with Processor set to Maximum, Graphics set to low, and the display at 1280x800. It will play at medium graphics settings however personally I would rather have a higher resolution.

Heat and Noise:

After owning a battery for hp pavilion dv3000 and battery hp pavilion dv9000 notebook with a desktop Pentium 4 HT chip, I have learned to appreciate noise, or lack thereof. This notebook is very quiet; it’s about as loud as my older HP AMD Sempron notebook with cool and quiet technology. I guess Speedstep is basically the same thing. The only time I hear the fans come on is when I’m playing graphically intense games or running my CPU to 100% (Seti@home.) In addition, this notebook also stays pretty cool; the right of the touchpad feels warm on occasion, but not hot. Nothing I can really complain about there.

Keyboard and Touchpad:

HP pavilion dv9000 as hp pavlilion dv3000 keyboard and touchpad (view large image)

The keyboard is very well laid out for a 15.4” pavilion dv9000 battery laptop. It feels...Solid! None of the typical loud clickity-clackity type sounds emit from it, which is nice. The touchpad, as I said before, is very good. It’s sensitive and responds very well. It has a built in scrolling feature which is a bonus, however doesn’t always work 100% of the time. The touchpad buttons are alright. They feel kind of cheap and seem like they would break easily if pressed too hard.

Customer Support:

HP as well as battery for hp pavilion dv5000 basically all other computer manufacturer companies have sent their customer service department over to India. This isn’t a bad thing as it keeps the prices of electronics down considerably and creates jobs for Indian people, however it is at times hard to understand the reps because of the language/culture barrier. Overall however the HP customer service is very good, as long as you don’t mind waiting awhile on the phone, and eventually speak to someone that knows what they are talking about.

Conclusion:

The dv9000 is a great customizable notebook for all kinds of people. Whether you need just a basic laptop to surf the web and write documents, a medium range gaming machine, or something to just crunch lots of data this notebook can do it all when configured appropriately. It’s hard to find things wrong with such a beautiful and well built laptop, I can’t stop admiring its zen-type design even while I type this. Overall I think this is very balanced hp pavilion dv9000 battery and priced very well comonentwise. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who needs a powerful machine, while still retaining stylish and futuristic looks.