Great Deals on Dell Laptops w/ Win7
- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
-
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Absolutely more bangs for your buck."
Pros: 17" Wide Screen, 2x HDD, Play media w/o booting to Windows, runs cool and quite.
Cons: Have not found one yet.....
Summary: Well, I almost bought a Dell XPS M140. It would have been a good laptop, but it makes more sense to go with this HP dv8000z due to more standard option that you get with it.
First of, battery life is as expected to be shorter due to the screen size and 2nd hard drive. So don't even compare to any thing else with a smaller screen size or same screen size with more cells in the battery.
1:35 full load ? CPU peak 100% (1.79 GHz)
2:40 Normal use ? CPU idle with normal load (800MHz ? 1.2GHz)
How I test battery life:
Full load: run fold@home until the laptop shuts down.
Normal use: Photo editing, video editing (w/o render), office product, web browsing. (Adobe PhotoShop/Premier 2.0)
Integrated wireless work flawlessly and very strong thanks to the antennae?s mounted on the inside (top) of the screen.
I was able to pick up 3 other wireless router/access point from my house that my IBM was not able to pick up (AT&T PCMCIA card).
Photo and video editing is amazingly fast. Compare clock per clock to my desktop (P4 3.2 over clocked to 3.7GHz with 2x512 Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM) that can render 8Gig of video in 37 min.
But this baby (ML-32 stock 1.8GHz with 2x256 PC2700 RAM) does the same file in only 1:14(h:m)
Heat is NOT an issue with this one. I set mine up on ?Home/Office Desk? as when on AC, it would run full speed (1.8GHz). But when on battery, it would throttle down to 800MHz at idle and increase the MHz if/when software/system demands it. Did not notice any speed difference or lag between the 2 modes.
I found that fan comes on more often when plug in then on battery and run a little cooler as well.
This is NOT a gamer?s laptop for sure since it?s got the integrated GPU with 128 Hypermemory, but you can allocate another 128meg from system memory to it easily.
3DMark03 score 1542 on my ML-32 with standard 128 RAM. I supposed you can play games that less GPU intensive.
On board 6-in-1 media reader is great and very handy. Especially for shutterbugs that use?s any of those types of media on their camera. I wish one of the six would include CF reader, but it didn?t. Too bad for me, I have to use an external reader for that one.
Integrated speakers/sound is pretty decent for a laptop (as with most laptop). I just plug mine up to a my Logitech Z-2300 and it sound better then my desktop (ASUS P4C800-Delux mobo)
The credit card size media remote control is small and fits in one of the PCMCIA slot for storing. But don?t let the size full you. The beam is very strong and I was able to control the media functions about 15 ft. away w/o problem.
Overclocking, I was able to use clockgen to overclock this laptop. The highest speed it?ll go is 1,980MHz (2.0GHz or ML-37). At idle or full CPU load, I did not observe any temperature increase and it pass all test w/o any error.
Test: Memtest86 for 12 hrs. and, fold@home for another 12 hrs.
So, for $0, I was able to gain 200MHz or bump up my ML-32 to ML-37 (w/o cache) with out endangering the hardware or increasing in temperature.
Laptop comes with a 65watts power supply, and it?s pretty small and light. However, when charging your battery and/or laptop is at full load. It can get VERY hot. HP send me another one and it runs a little cool but still hotter then my liking.
Over all, I would recommend this laptop to any of my friends and family any day. Well, as a matter of fact, I have.
