Item : B001FWWAF0 Customer Reviews You don't get what you pay for! by .. Dr. J (WI, USA) Pros: It was delivered on time however, the vendor/shipper (came from [..]) required a signature and this wasn't stated ANYWHERE prior to ordering. Thus, I had to drive over 100 miles to go pick it up. I paid for express delivery and since I live out in the country (no neighbors), I asked for them to leave it in a specific place (like all my deliveries) but they couldn't because of this undisclosed secret. Okay so this could be a CON too! Point is, be home so you can sign for it. Full keyboard and number pad. The screen is big and a nice LCD 1080p view. You can turn off the pointing device with one click great speed and processing. great disk size. When it works, the sound is very nice from the laptop. ****CONS****: Received BLACK not Bronze machine. There was nothing stated that the color may vary. The piano black (high gloss) shows everything and appears messy all the time. The MUTE fails A LOT and sound didn't work from the moment I took it out of the box. When you touch the MUTE on the hardware (not software controlled), the light goes amber and stays like that know matter how many times you touch it or reboot. HP states "I" have to remove the device, run recovery, reinstall it, and reboot. I found I have to do this EVERY time I mute, as such. The 'Support' person REFUSED to write this up as a bug and refused to look at the issue further. Needless to say, HP's Customer support is POOR and really isn't there to HELP or make their product better. I already knew this, as I own many HP products but I thought this 'service' really stood out as the worst. The laptop is very heavy. the laptop is difficult to open and close (tight hinges); there is no latch to keep it close so, I assume that is why they did this. No documentation (hardcopy or digital) is included with the machine. The ability to watch DVD movies is NOT enabled out of the box. You have to go and download codec encryption software so you can watch a regular, typical DVD. I didn't have this issue with my other HP desktops so I can only assume it is a 'special feature' of this model only. There is no light on the laptop and the keyboard is not backlit. My old laptop had a function key to turn on a light. Even though they give you a full keyboard and number pad they do not turn on the number pad by default so you need to do this yourself and save it in the registry. The have Tablet PC software installed for some reason which conflicts with the video and IE7. It needs to be uninstalled or patched (Microsoft has a patch for this blunder). Because there is no documentation, I have no clue how to use the little 'TV Tuner' they included. It looks like it is suppose to plug in somewhere but I can't find anything that looks like the socket and I've tried to use it like my other HP machine and it does nothing. BIG CON: the DVD is very picky and cannot use MANY brands of media to record onto. According to HP "Support" only Sony and HP lightscribe DVDs work in this one model of laptop (again, this is HP saying this NOT me as I don't know since I haven't gotten it to work yet). Another 'feature' that was NOT disclosed to us in any documentation. My other 2 HP desktop machines have no issue with the lightscribe disks I have! same computer, cheaper at bestbuy by .. Amy Agotness () This is a great laptop, but you can purchase it for $649 at best buy instead of the price amazon is selling it for. Great Computer Poor Supplier by .. Serious Computer User (Huntington Beach, CA) GOOD: The computer works fine right out of the box and is easy to setup with good, on screen instructions. BAD: Amazon sent the wrong color laptop. The specifications (writeup) and picture shows the bronze and silver laptop but they sent the black model which is $35.00 cheaper than the bronze finish according to HP website. So what did Amazon do about it, NOTHING. I hope you (Amazon) enjoy my the $35.00. I really wanted to like it... by .. John Robertson (Phoenix, AZ) Summary ======= If you want to web browse, do easy word or photo processing, or watch DVD's, then this laptop will work for you. And it does look nice. If you have any kind of real-time intensive application, do not expect the 4GB of RAM and dual-core RM-70 processors to save you -- it's a pig. If you can stomach the expert effort to get XP to run, you'll love it (wow, fast, even with the system-limited addressing of only 3GB of the RAM) but the audio drivers will not work, plus you will waste a week of your life. I rushed to buy it and did not realize certain deficiencies due to my own haste, but still, both HP and Microsoft came up short on this one. A friend of mine had the previous generation of this laptop -- a dv8000 with XP Pro with a devoted graphics card. I used both the dv7-1130us and the older dv8000 for two weeks, and just fell in love with the dv8000. I wanted to like the dv7, I really did, but honestly and truly, I have to advise scrutizing users against it. Buy an XP-capable machine, and/or wait for Vista's replacement in the 2010 timeframe. There are a lot of vitriolic reviews and opinions on the internet today, but this isn't one of them. I really wanted to like this emergency replacement laptop for my 5 1/2 year old, recently dead HP ze5400. I now wish I spent a little more money or looked around more. But's let's first try to be positive: The Good ======== * Laptop looks sexy. Mine is silver, but this or the bronze color scheme look pretty glitzy. The glowing HP logo on the back looks cool too. * Beautiful display for rendering photos, movies, etc. * Light for a 17" laptop, around 6 lbs. Also quite skinny, relieving wrist fatigue for long periods of typing. * 4GB of fast DDR2 RAM. Also, a second hard drive slot is available for additional HDD, although there's a demerit to this (see The Bad). The Bad ======= * The second hard drive position does not include a carrier/bracket to mount it. Online price for these between $40 and 60 -- if you can find them. I predict these will soon become a commodity, but until then, you have to suffer. Not even HP sells them, although the part number is available on the website and in the laptop manual. * No 1394 firewire support. It does have an eSATA port, but my video camera only has a firewire port -- you have to buy adapters or a new video camera. * No XP downgrade support. I bought a new, faster 7200 RPM hard drive and managed to load it with my old XP Pro, plus most drivers. However, HP does not yet have a driver for the internal laptop speakers. You can hear audio via the headphone jack, but it's annoying to always have to have headphones to hear any audio. And the effort it takes to do this -- I've been working on computers since 1979 and this was a real pain to get XP to run. This is not for the faint of heart. HP's support website quite unequivocally says they do not support XP downgrades on laptops with OneTouch buttons like the dv5 and dv7, although I cannot help wondering if this may one day change. Currently, I'm using the Vista HDD (and do NOT try a dual boot -- you WILL corrupt at least the Vista if you do -- see more in The Ugly). * Vista really and truly does have some problems. I don't hate Microsoft. I love Office, and have generally liked XP and Win2000 more than Apple or free Unix OS's. But Vista, my goodness, even with the 4GB of RAM and a dual core runs more slowly on this machine than XP Pro did with 1GB and a Pentium 4 on my old machine. There are lags in typing and mouse clicks. There are program crashes with relatively modern 32 bit programs that won't run on this 64 bit Vista Home Premium OS. I just bought a 2 year, 3 PC license from ZoneAlarms and it won't run on this!! Yes, yes, I know, you can argue that's ZA fault, but believe me, just you wait and buy this machine, you'll see what I mean with your existing software and if you have them, utilities. You can turn off most of the warning messages (thank goodness) but there are still numerable dialog boxes that will not resize, or tell you things you learned 20 years ago. I actually had a dialog box loop, flashing two contentious boxes several hundred times per minute, throttling the CPU's real time. The next time you hear a bunch of geeks putting Vista down, understand it's not just all an anti-Microsoft kick. * Native screen resolution for the 17" screen is only 1440 x 900, WXGA. My old boat-anchor laptop had a 1680 x 1050 with only a 15" screen. Things don't seem to have progressed much. Indeed, the old laptop was SXGA+, and you can get the dv7-1130us with a WSXGA+ screen, but you must go to the HP website and configure it -- you'll never see a ready-made one with this. I wish store and website merchandisers had some education and would learn to offer these things. Again, you can say this is my fault for not researching enough. But the old laptop could show two, full pages in MS Word at a small but razor-sharp 75% zoom, with it's 15" screen. This new laptop can only show two full pages on MS Word at a virtually unreadable 63%, and it has a 17" screen. * It can be very hard to read the silkscreened characters on the keyboard, particularly the function keys. When it's dim, you better be a good typer, because the key lettering is unreadable. Also, previous and even certain current HP laptops have slightly roughed key surfaces. The glossy smooth keys on this seemed nice on day 1, but it starts to get annoying. Your opinion may differ. The Ugly ======== * BIOS - HP specially designed the startup bios to work with Vista on this machine. Booting from dual drives, even if connected via USB or network interfaces, will interfere with the installed SATA HDD. It is not a flexible bios, depending on what you want to do. For those of you wanting to do an XP reversion, look out. Actually, just entering the bios was a horror. Because there was no delay on the bootup, I had to just continuously hit "F2" a few times....this corrupted Vista!! The corruption was so bad, I needed to use the recovery partition, not just the backup DVD-ROM (which you must make yourself when you take the laptop of the box -- please, please, please do this). I've never seen an OS get corrupt just by having to hit a key a few times to enter the bios. Hey Mr Ballmer, can you say "regression test"? * The trackpad and/or its driver is out of alignment. I am ALWAYS inadvertently closing programs, scrolling, etc when I don't want to be. I will have to disable this. I am closely watching my hand and finger placement every time this happens, thinking that I'm still just getting used to the computer, but for example, after I inadvertently scroll to the top of a large html page and lose my place, I immediately look down to see my fingers approx 3/4 inch from the scroll bar, yet it was scrolling. I see this as an HP issue. I've been typing on this laptop for almost two months now and am still not used to it. It has never taken this long to get used to a different keyboard. * No PCMCIA support. There is an ExpressCard port, the modern equivalent and replacement port for PCMCIA. But I had a Verizon Wireless PCMCIA modem/phone card and another type of adapter, both now useless. I just bought another parallel port adapter for ExpressCard to use with this laptop, but it unseats all the time. The locking mechanism seems broken. I'm very disappointed in this. For my use, this would have been a deal-killer if I had been aware of it. I know it's kind of fun in a voyeuristic way to see someone buy something without having researched it properly, but I run a small home-based business and needed a new laptop fast. It just never dawned on me that a new laptop wouldn't have PCMCIA slot. Well, the review is getting pretty long, and there's more I could say, but I think you get the idea. It's a nice laptop to look at, and depending on what you want to do or what software you already own, it may work just fine for you. I know what it's like to read an Amazon review and see some poor soul describe his or her's misfortune with some product, and because you're disconnected from their reality, it all amounts to just some level of interesting reading. All I can say is think carefully before buying this series of laptop. If I've offended any of you who rated it 5 stars, well, that's the purpose of reviews. You rate 5, I rate 2, and somewhere out of it all we get an average score. UPDATE: ====== Yes, I'm making the review longer (!). XP runs quite well. I have grown to live without the inboard speakers, which is actually nice when I'm working in internet cafes, airports, etc as I never have to worry about accidentally unplugging the headphones and becoming an inadvertent DJ for unwilling listeners around me. I think there is a driver/processor real-time issue with this laptop. For example, when editing a text-only document in Word 2007, with Real Player playing an MP3 audio file, and Windows Explorer launched, the audio chatters or cuts-in-and-out for 10 seconds. I disabled Zone Alarms anti-virus software, defragged last week, and had no other user-enabled programs in the background or foreground, with 42 system tasks showing on Task Manager, and left the laptop plugged-in (as power save slows down many things). I used to do the exact same type of work on my older HP ze5400, single-core Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM, running the same software and OS, with the same number of tasks, with no recent defrags, and it almost never interrupted the audio playback, maybe on very rare occasions causing a 1 second delay. This is a poor showing for a computer with double the processor power and more than double the RAM, all running identical versions of Windows and productivity software -- only the drivers and hardware differ. Also, the power adapter doesn't always work, and hasn't since day 1. I thought this was a simple, intermittent plug or cable, but I've actually been able to measure voltage on it, and when I plug it into the laptop, no charging. Not yet sure if this is a software or hardware fault. On the plus side, I am still getting a real 3 hours of use when on battery (no wi-fi enabled) -- not bad for a 17 incher. On balance, though, the review stands, 2/5 stars. I am seriously considering alternative laptops. The speed, robustness and security of SSD hard drives has caught my attention, and I expect the dv7 will be my last computer with a rotating HDD, although I don't claim that to be the cause to all my difficulties with this machine. But if you can swing it, I'd consider SSD before buying a computer today, and compensating for the smaller size of these drives with a portable/backup HDD. FINAL UPDATE: ============ Well, I did it to myself I suppose, but while going through airport security on a very busy day, I inadvertently grasped the laptop too tightly. There is now a break in the screen that suspiciously looks about the size and shape of my thumb! In short, the display is useless. I did not purchase a no-liability warranty, and HP understandably won't cover it, so my dv7-1130us has become a temporary 'desktop', when used with an external VGA monitor. Once getting it to XP, it operated fairly well, but in truth, it was only about as fast as the 6 year old, HP ze5400 2.4GHz P4 with 1GB RAM it replaced. Me and a co-worker with a similar machine suspect the HP drivers/BIOS or perhaps some bottleneck on the mobo just doesn't allow this laptop to run all that fast. I can disable anti-virus/program controlling software like McAfee or ZoneAlarms, but it never seemed to help speed it up much. I think I will be retiring the dv7-1130 a little early. The replacement is a brand new, bouncing, baby MacBook Pro 17" (Amazon review Apr 26, 2009). No, it's not a comparable machine, but it seemed like the time to go for a higher-performance laptop, if also higher-cost. It is certainly more durable, which is apparently something I need. As a word of caution, though, I actually have managed to never break a computer, cell phone or two-way radio in 30 years, so I'd suggest being VERY CAREFUL picking up your 1130. HP cannot make sub-$1,000 laptops without reducing some costs, so while I cannot really hold them to any fault for its construction, the size and weight of this laptop requires a little extra care given the relatively thin plastic display housing. Nice Laptop by .. Corte33 (San Jose, CA) I have never been disappointed with HP computers. This was easy to set up and sync to my wireless router. It comes loaded with software, some of which I'll never use. It also comes with Norton anti-virus software. I removed the Norton software (uninstalled it). I've had bad experiences with Norton software, and didn't want it to foul up this computer. I downloaded my own preference, AVG. The 17-inch screen is great. The laptop comes with Vista Premium, which has had problems, and will be soon replaced by a better operating system (I hope!).