Recently, I bought an HP dv7t-4000 laptop. I’ve had it for about a week now and I’d like to give my 7-day review of the product after using it for a while. I’ll start with the good and work down to the bad.

Wireless: (10/10) I can see more wireless accesspoints than I could even see in my home with a macbook pro.

CPU Power: (10/10) I upgraded to the i7 processor, so I’ve got a 4-core CPU with hyperthreadding (so 8 cores to the OS) in Windows and in Linux.

Memory: (10/10) Comes with 6GB ram. Has not been too little for me yet even with virtual machines running on it.

Screen: (10/10) Awesome 1600x900 screen. Very bright and clean-looking.

3D Graphics performance: (10/10) I opted for the ATI graphics card which performs nicely. I loaded up a couple of games and maxxed-out the graphics settings on them and I got a minimum of 15-20 fps, so I’m very satisfied with the graphics even though I don’t do a lot of gaming overall.

2D Graphics performance: (9/10) Pretty nice video playback. I can do full HD video on youtube and I only get an occasional choppiness. I’m guessing that the CPU is not even breathing hard doing the decompression. The graphics card is pretty capable, so the choppiness could be the network or flash or something else. Not really all that worried about video - it works and it’s nice enough.

Price: (8/10) The laptop retails for $1500, but I got it with an online coupon for around $1000.

Heat: (8/10) It runs a little hot. Not unusual for any laptop, but you could char your left leg a little if you put it on your lap cock-eyed or something for more than a few minutes. You could warm a soda in a very short while if you put down a soda near the vent. The vent is not hot-to-the-touch, but it definitely puts out some heat.

Audio: (7/10) The laptop sells itself as a gaming laptop, but the audio capture is sub-par and the speakers are just ok and the headphone audio is just about in-line with any other laptop (you really can’t mess up the headphone output too much). There are three audio input devices (webcam, microphone and HDMI) and three outputs (speakers, headphones and HDMI). I accidentally disabled the webcam microphone and for the life of me I couldn’t re-enable it even in the hardware manager - it was just gone. Re-installing the webcam software didn’t bring it back. I had to do a system restore (rollback) of Windows 7 back to 24 hours earlier for the OS to undo my stupid mistake of disabling the mic on the webcam. I was unable to find out how to capture audio using Propellerhead’s Record through the Microphone plug - not sure if that’s the laptop’s fault, windows’ fault or Record’s fault.

Webcam: (6/10) Eh. Does 640x480 and works good enough. Not super-highres, but who really cares, it’s a webcam. The HP software for it is just ok.

Windows 7: (6/10) Comes with Windows 7 Home edition. Upgrading to Pro was $50 more. Upgrading to Ultimate was $50 more yet. I would’ve upgraded to ultimate if it were $30-$40, but not $100. Windows kinda works and kinda sucks.

Laptop shell: (6/10) part metal, part plastic - some edges don’t align nicely with the other edges of the case. DVD player doesn’t align very close at all when closed.

Size: (5/10) The laptop is huge. It requires a 17” laptop bag or backpack. It’s 6 lbs not including the power supply, second battery or anything else. It’s a beast.

Battery life: (4/10) The 9-cell battery gives me about 2.5 hours of a charge when the laptop is under solid use. The 6-cell is just under 2 hours of charge. I bought both batteries because I kind of figured that the laptop would be a power-hog with the i7 processor.

HP crapware: (1/10) The laptop came pre-loaded with hundreds of packages and 50GB of my 500GB drive used as a recovery partition that I dare not touch (HP - you should hide this or something so people don’t nuke it at least). HP made all of the partitions primary, so I wasn’t able to squish-down the main partition to install linux (FYI: there can only be 4 primary partitions on a drive, but you can make one partition an extended partition and make bunches more partitions inside of the extended one - but since I can’t nuke the HP ‘special’ partitions, I was unable to re-create one as an extended partition so I could put a fifth one on the drive for linux. Boo HP!

Second Harddrive slot: (0/10) I bought the laptop with only one harddrive in it (it has the option of two and even hardware-raid if requested), but I wanted to put a second aftermarket harddrive in it and after opening up the bottom compartment (which is plastic and not very durable) I found that the harddrive sled and cables aren’t included for a second harddrive. Aftermarket parts run $70+shipping. Much more if you order the part from HP. Stop nickle-and-diming your customers!

Linux: I installed both CentOS 5.5 and Fedora 13 on an external USB harddrive and both of them installed well on the machine. Both recognized the wireless and internal network cards, X was a no-brainer, audio worked and all went pretty well. The problem was that I didn’t want to have to boot off of an external USB drive (which was pretty damn slow) when I wanted to use Linux. I eventually went with a VirtualBox VM of linux instead since I had a lot of spare CPU cycles and the HD speed was actually faster than a USB drive install. The Virtualization capabilities of the i7 CPU were turned off by default, so I had to go into the BIOS and enable it before I could get my VM under VirtualBox to be happy, but that was an easy change (hint, hit ESC at boot-time and then F9 to enter the BIOS).

Well, that’s about it after a week of use. If I find anything else out after more time with it, I’ll post another review.

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