Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
This laptop is appealing to anyone looking for ultra-portable laptop at a normal notebook price. It is a pretty good overall package. After using it for couple of weeks, I'm really satisfied with it. This will serve me well as my main laptop for couple of years (hopefully longer), since I primarily use it for web browsing, document editing, minimal photo editing and similar, nothing too CPU intensive.Windows 7 works really well out of the box. But, I like to use Linux and am running ubuntu on it as my primary OS, that's the main reason I bought this laptop. But I used Windows 7 on the laptop for sometime and found it to be a great OS, very polished and solid. Everything worked effortlessly.I bought it from HP and has the i3-2367M processor, which is slightly faster than the i3-2357M mentioned on this product on amazon. I'd recommend getting the better, if the price is same. cpubenchmark dot net rates i3-2367M (score=1921) a 16% better than i3-2357M (score=1650). FIRST IMPRESSIONThis a very cool little device. Unboxing was a joy, to uncover the tiny laptop out of its package. There's really very few laptops out there, which are so small and yet so cheap, but at the same time, provide enough CPU and Memory to last you a few years.You should know that all the praise is in context of the price. This is no macbook air, not even close. But then it costs half the price of a macbook air. Its an HP and its plasticky but it feels much nicer because of the better build quality. Under the body, it has an aluminium frame, so its probably stronger than it looks.Chracoal color is really just a fancy name for black. Its really not much different from black. The screen bezel is black, the keyboard is black. The surface surrounding the keyboard is just a tad lighter than black (hence charcoal). Similarly the surface on top and bottom of the laptop are also blackish/charcoal.The i3 processor at 20% usage can easily handle 5-6 web browser tabs, youtube or any other video and few other apps. So, its good enough for most users.My biggest complaint was with all the HP crapware that came preinstalled on this computer. HP likes to overwhelm the machine with all kinds of rubbish software no one needs or uses. HP Market, HP games store, HP book store, HP music store, HP launcher to name a few. And if that's not enough, many of them are loaded on windows start up so it makes system slower. It just was a very crappy experiences using the computer for the first time. All the poorly written software actually made the computer slow and sluggish. And it ran a little hot with the fan frequently on. I had to take the time and uninstall all of them and then it was much better.HP doesn't know software, they are a hardware company .... period. I have never seen so many horrible apps from 1 company all at 1 place. When you setup your user account on windows for the first time, HP likes to set its logo as the windows user image/icon, by default. Most computers these days offer you a choice to use as your user image a set of icons or even the ability to shoot your photo with the webcam and set it as your user image, but not HP. They like to own us by pasting their logo on us. Its not a big deal, just a minor annoyance, but its small things like these which lead to a poor first experience. HP!! if you read this, please save us from the wrath of your developers. We are paying you for this nice machine, please just give us windows and just the drivers. No lousy softwares please.SECOND IMPRESSIONAfter the HP crapware was gone, the computer was much nicer. It was fast and responsive and the CPU is sufficient for most day to day activities. Mine has 4GB memory which is enough memory, for normal usage. I believe this computer can really benefit from an SSD drive. I noticed that the Disk I/O was the only stat which stayed slightly higher. Although, with the 500rpm hard drive, this is still very usable, and there's no major complaints here. But if someone wants better performance, an SSD drive should be the first thing to consider. Although thats an extra $200 minimum, which puts this laptop in a different price range. I wouldn't recommend getting the SSD preinstalled from HP though, because that will make this a $900 machine, which is too much for it. You can shop for better options in that price range.If you're a power user and a tinkerer, this machine is an absolute delight. When you take the battery out, you can remove the bottom cover which is just sort of locked in, no screws. After you remove the cover, you can see the RAM, Hard drive and the rest. Everything is easily accessible and upgradeable. You can buy an after-market Memory or SSD Drive and stick it in there.I tried Chromium OS (unofficial) on this laptop, and it ran surprisingly well. So, if you're tech-savvy this can be your Chrome-book, actually even better, because you're not stuck with just a browser. You can always boot back into Windows when you need it. Initially, I tried running Chromium OS from a Flash drive. But I figured the USB will use up some of the battery, so I wiped out my entire hard drive and did a fresh install of Chromium OS. So, now I can boot into Chromium OS whenever I like. I've tried it for sometime, and it runs nicely. I get around 7 hours of battery life on Chromium OS. It is snappy and responsive and just so simple. When you plug in a USB drive, it opens a file manager as a tab in chrome browser, so you can access files and open them, if you're stuck without internet. You can even copy Photos from you camera to it. It has the potential to be my primary OS.Next, I installed Ubuntu, since thats what I really wanted this laptop for. I wanted to run linux as my primary OS and needed a machine which works well on linux (i.e. has drivers for all the hardware). Ubuntu 11.10 detected all the hardware on this laptop and everything worked right out of the box including wifi, special keys (brightness, sound), multi-touch trackpad etc. On Linux, I get close to 6 hours of battery life, but it varies (because I'm constantly installing softwares which keep the machine busy) and I have yet to get a realistic estimate. But its good enough from what I can tell. I don't have to always walk around with my adapter. I had a 2008 macbook before this which had an official battery life of 7hrs, and this laptop performs very similar in terms of battery.Battery life on Windows 7 was also around 7 hours, with the screen brightness turned down and power saving set to high. Adobe Flash is the heaviest hitter on battery and CPU heat/Fan Noise.Note to anyone who might try installing other OSes: Gparted and CloneZilla are the best free softwares for partitioining and cloning paritions/disks. Be sure to Backup the C drive as well as all the HP partitions including the recovery parition.The partition scheme of this laptop is a little weak, out of the box. There are 4 primary partitions created by HP (and you can create only 4 "primary" partitions at max). First partition is a 200MB hidden partition. Second partition is the C drive (450+ GB). Third partition is the D drive which is only 13GBs and holds setups for HP softwares. Last partition is hidden recovery partition.So, if you decide to shrink the C drive and create another partition, you can't because you can have only 4 primary partitions on a drive. You can create extended partitions and logical drives under it, but that means you'll need to delete one ore more of the HP partitions (which I did).I used CloneZilla (bootable CD) to backup all paritions, so I can perform a factory restore myself, if I ever need to. And then repartitioned everything using Gparted (bootable CD).DETAILS/PROSScreen (5/5): Very bright, glossy, very nice to look at. I always keep the brightness at minimum, unless I'm in a sunlit room. 11.6" is just the right size at 1366x768 resolution. Small enough to be portable, large enough to be readable, not too small like the netbook.Trackpad (4/5): is okay, does the job. Better than many other laptops, but not the best I ever used. The trackpad buttons are a little too tight, so you need to use lot of pressure when clicking. I prefer to use single tap for left click and 2 finger tap for right click so, it doesn't bother me much.Battery (4/5): 6.5 to 7 hours for general web browsing, at screen brightness turned down Weight (5/5): 3.5 lbs is very light, in fact its a de-lightAudio (4/5): Beats Audio is fine, but nothing to brag about. Its can be very loud which is nice when you need it. But the sound quality is nothing extraordinary coming from the laptop. I've heard laptops with better sounds, but usually they cost more. Its fine for watching movies or youtube. Probably not good enough for listening to music (but then I have high standards when it comes to music). I tested it with external speakers (Altec Lansing) and the sound was spectacular. But for the laptop speakers, I'd still give 4 out of 5.CPU (5/5): The i3 processor is fast enough for day to day tasks. I've tried using Gimp Photo Editor and it runs fine. iTunes also loads up fairly quickly. It does not feel sluggish. i3 runs cool most of the time, unless you start watching youtube or visit any heavy flash based website and you'll see that the fan turns on. It might be a little slow for Raw photo editing, but I didn't get a chance to try.Memory (5/5): 4GB is really enough for most day-to-day tasks.Hard Drive (3/5): 500rpm is not the fastest, but its good enough and you have enough storage. I'd like to install an SSD drive at some point. But for now, the stock hard drive is working well.Price (5/5): $600... Read more ›

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