HP Pavilion DV6355ea

HP's Pavilion dv6355ea, is a very good notebook for the price, now you can find them well under £600.

It looks very sleek and high class, with its high gloss black outer case and silver inner, which has a kind of faint finger print style pattern [almost wave like] which from some angles looks like carbon fibre weave on the black outer case, on the silver inner case the faint finger print pattern gives it a look of a high class machine, unlike lots of notebooks which are very boring, its quickplay, power, wireless buttons are lit up in a nice modern led blue, I've had many people admire its looks.

Build quality is very good. Its has been made out of good quality materials and feels very sturdy and solid.

Features on this machine are plentiful. 15.4 inch widescreen [very high quality and good image, although it does suffer in direct sun light], Quickplay buttons [for quick launch of DVDs, webcam, music, etc.] are touch sensitive and located above the keyboard, Built in wireless and Bluetooth, Built in card reader [supports SD.MS/Pro.MMC.XD]. Built in web cam [1.3 MP], Twin microphones, DVD multi recorder [DVD+RW/ DL, CD-RW] with Lightscribe [laser etch your own disk labels on the disk itself], 3 USB ports and all other ports you would need, Firewire, ethernet etc, remote control [very thin, fits into its own side compartment, also has a nice sized key pad [nice to type on] and a good touchpad, Built in speakers are good for a laptop [Altec Lansing branded].

OS included is Vista Premium, main software included is Windows Movie Maker, Windows Media Player etc. and some software for burning DVDs and label making etc.

Main hardware is good, You get 1 GB of ram [upgradable to 4 GB]. CPU is Intel Core 2 Duo [T5300 1.7 GHz] which has the power for all business software, and most games. Graphics are handled by a Geforce Go 7400 [128 MB RAM built in, can use extra RAM from system with Turbo Cache]. The graphics are of a good quality, but the card is not a top end games card and while it will play all modern games but it may suffer in anything more than low to medium settings, games made up to 2005 will run very well and mostly in high settings. A large 160 GB hard drive is fitted [5400 RPM] and performs very well.

Bad points are few, but I feel the battery life could be better, I run mine in high performance mode which does reduce battery life. Also the power supply gets very hot, but not hot enough for concern.

Overall a good system for the price with lots of features, good looks and build quality. I would of liked the battery to perform a little better and maybe have 2 GB of RAM [1 GB runs Vista and other programs well enough, but for modern games get at least 2GB].