HP Pavilion dm4-1065dx

Pros: Battery Life - why can't PCs match Apple? One of the longest PC batteries available.

It is attractive - very good looking PC - it matters!

Hits the sweet spot for features: fast i5, great keyboard and touchpad, big 7200 RPM disk, 4G mem

Cons: The speakers are really the weak point.

Plenty of junkware - but that is always true for HP - use pc decrapifier!

Summary: I got this notebook for my daughter for college. She wanted a PC (I'm a Mac person), so I watched for just the right notebook. This one met my specs - i5, 500G 7200 RPM disk, 4G memory, lightweight (one of the lightest in the class), battery life over 5 hours, and a keyboard and touchpad my daughter would like.

This notebook met both my tech specs, and my daughter's specs for a good keyboard and touch pad. The fact this is a good looking notebook didn't hurt anything, either.

She's been using it about a month, and it has been great. Runs very quietly, stays cool, and is fast enough for anything she might need to do. It is small and lightweight, which is a plus for a student. And the battery life really is over 5 hours, which does not seem to be the case for most of the other notebooks in this class.

I've been through a whole bunch of notebook computers over the years, and while I believe that Macbooks are really better and worth a bit extra, I am really pleased with this notebook. By far and away the best PC notebook I've ever encountered - and at a very good price!

If you must have a PC, and don't need a desktop replacement for gaming or heavy duty video or professional photo processing, this notebook should be all you need for several years to come.

You will want to download and use PC Decrapifier to clean this notebook up. HP is really bad about including a bunch of trialware and other junk you really don't want. And you'll probably not want to use
the instant start software - Win7 boots pretty fast.

I never thought I'd say it, but this is a really nice PC notebook. And Windows 7 seems a great improvement over other versions. For the first time ever in my career of configuring new Windows computers, the move from my daughter's old computer to this new one went flawlessly. Not as smoothly or quickly as a Mac migration, but even so, there were no problems. Never had that happen before, and it was nice to finally see that.