HP g60-507dx review *56K Warning*

I just picked up 2 HP g60-507dx laptops at Best Buy yesterday for $197.00 before tax (1 for me and 1 for the wife). I stood in line for 8+ hours in the cold with some friends and had a blast doing it. I'm really glad I got in line at 8pm the night before. I was the 9th person in line and the last person to get the laptop door buster deal.... and man was the door buster deal really slick this year. I've never bought a full laptop for under 500.00 before, and having 2 laptops with Windows 7 for 197.00 each was just too good to pass up. Even a license for Windows 7 alone costs over 120.00 so in reality you get a slick new system for roughly next to nothing.

Anyway back to the review! Last time I did a review it was for my Acer Aspire 5672 series 4 years ago - Link, and I'm happy to say that my old laptop is still going strong with Windows 7. The reason for this new purchase was because I was looking for something to take to work or on trips that I wouldn't be distraught over if I left it in a cab or it was damaged / broken / etc. That and a netbook just wasn't my style (too small, etc.)

Product Support Page: - Link

HP's Unoffical Windows XP Downgrade Guide: - Link

Specifications Overview:

Warranty - 1 year limited
Product Weight - 6.6 lbs.
Color - Black Exterior / Silver Touchpad and plastics
Individual Component Compartments (Memory / Wireless NIC / HDD)
65W AC Adapter
Processor - Intel® Celeron® 2.2GHz
Battery - 6-cell lithium-ion
Display - High-definition widescreen with BrightView technology (1366 x 768)
Screen Size - 15.6" (Measured Diagonally)
System Bus - 800MHz
Cache Memory - 1MB
System Memory Type - Kingston Technology® PC2 6400S 1GB x2 (2GB Total)
System Memory (RAM) - Expandable to 4GB
Type of Memory (RAM) - DDR2 DIMM
Hard Drive Type - Western Digital® Scorpio Black® / SATA (7200 rpm)
Hard Drive Size - 160GB
Optical Drive - Double-layer DVD±RW/CD-RW
Light Scribe Compatible
5 in 1 Digital Media Reader - Secure Digital cards, MultiMedia cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, or xD Picture cards
Yes, digital media card reader
Graphics - Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M (Up to 797MB shared)
56K Modem - HDA CX20583 Soft Modem
Wired Networking - Realtek RTL8102E/RTL8103E Family PCI-E Fast Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.20)
Wireless Networking - Atheros AR9285 802.11b/g WiFi Adapter
Audio - Altec Lansing HD Audio
USB 2.0 Ports - 3 (1 left 2 right)
Battery Life - Up to 2 hours and 45 minutes
Pointing Device - Touchpad with on/off button and dedicated vertical scroll up/down pad
HDMI Output - Yes! (left hand side)
Operating System - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Included Software - Microsoft Works; Cyberlink DVD Suite; Adobe Acrobat; Norton Online Backup; etc.

Packaging / Case:




This is the first time I have purchased an HP laptop, and I must say that their package was "ok" but not as good as other manufacturers. I'm an Acer fan, and they typically double package their stuff. Now granted I did purchase the laptop from a brick and mortar store, so their might be less packaging than if I purchased it online. Decent but by no means "above and beyond" the call of duty.

Unboxing Pictures:

My wife was confused at what the heck I was doing when I came home and started taking pictures of the new laptop before even opening it up and turning it on She mentioned something about being married to a geek

Anyway from what you can see in the pictures, the laptop comes packaged with cardboard holding it snug and secure for shipping. Dell typically uses styrofoam so props to HP for going "green" I suppose.

AC Adapter:



I pulled AC Adapter out first which included the brick and 3 prong plug. According to the lables it shows to be 65 watts which is fairly low on the power consumption scale. To give you an idea, my old Acer (with dedicated x1600 graphics card) runs over 110w.

Battery:



Next was the battery and a notice stating that the battery was not charged. (It also included a short statement about how to "optimize the battery life" in the user manual)

Battery is a 6 cell Lithium Ion that is fully embedded in the laptop. Some of the larger HP's come with a very large battery that actually "extends" out and sometimes down causing the laptop to be elevated up about 2 inches or so.

Quick Start Guide:



Next I pulled out the white piece of paper that was tucked around the box that included the user manuals. Pretty standard here.... how to plug it in, etc. Back side of the "guide" includes a quick tour to show the different features of the laptop. Nothing really new here for most users...only read this if you are over the age of 65 or computer illiterate.

User Guide and Documentation:




I opened up the box that held all the EULA and documentation on the laptop next. Inside you will find things such as....

Limited Warranty and Technical Support pamphlet
M$ Windows Live EULA document
Light Scribe pamphlet
Promo for Norton Internet Security
Soft cloth wipe
Pamphlet for offers on HP stuff you don't want
Free HP notepad
Worldwide telephone numbers for support
User Manual
Coupon for 20% off at hpdirect.com

Personal thoughts on the boxing:

Overall the included box materials are nice, however the one thing that appeared to be missing was a recovery disk or physical restore media of any kind. This means that HP has decided to go with a D2D recovery partition (disk 2 disk). So make sure that when you power on the laptop for the first time you grab 3 blank DVD's and create a set of recovery media for your laptop. You can run this recovery tool under the "Recovery Manager" located under the Start Menu. Total time it took to allocate the files, burn the disk, and verify the disk was about 45 min's.... so bring a good book.

Laptop Overview:




Above are photo's of the laptop unboxing and and overview. The battery does not come pre-installed on any laptop you would purchase, and this is no different. You will however notice that the removal of the HP laptops include a slider that pops the battery out. I'm not sure if this is standard on all HP models, but it is different from what I have seen on Dell's / Toshiba's / Acer's / etc.

You will also notice that the underside of the laptop includes 3 independent compartments (HDD / Memory / Wireless NIC). Before even turning the unit on I thought I would peek under the hood to see exactly what is offered hardware wise.

The one downside to this HP is that it does NOT include a separate removable compartment for the CPU and cooling assembly. Dell also does not offer this on the models I have worked on, but Acer does This means that if you need to clean the unit, upgrade the cpu, or replace a part internally you will have to fully disassemble the laptop to get to it. I'll have a full tear down guide in the weeks ahead.

Inside the g60-507dx:




Inside the three removable compartments you will find pretty standard layout and configuration. The HDD is in a cage that is held by 3 screws and includes a small plastic tab that is used to slide the cage to the right.

The other 2 compartments hold the memory and the wireless nic.

Hard Drive:




As mentioned above, the hard drive is a 160GB Western Digital Scorpio Black. I ran the drive though Western Digital's warranty Check and it came back with no warranty at all. This means the HDD is warranted though the manufacturer (OEM) which is pretty standard for all equipment. I am happy that the drive is 7,200RPM, when most drives in starter laptops are 5,400RPM.

**please note**
To remove the HDD cover you will need to "lift" the plastic up and then "slide" it to the right. You can not just lift it straight up, doing so will cause the plastic to break!

Memory:



Both memory banks are stacked on top of each other. I noticed that the stickers that are put on by HP were done so by hand, and done fairly "sloppily". I took the time to remove the stickers, but this is entirely your choice.

The memory is produced by Kingston and is speed rated at 6400S. According to CPU-Z the CAS latency is 5-5-5-15

Wireless:



The wireless card in this model laptop is made by Atheros. Windows 7 picks up the driver right away out of the box which is nice. Wireless range is working just fine, however Linux support might a bit more difficult (but more on that later). The card as shrunk since the last time I saw a PCI-1X slot for laptops. You will notice that this laptop also supports a full size 1X card if you wanted to have it installed (Wireless N anyone? ). It also appears HP has labeled absolutely EVERYTHING in this laptop with their own stickers showing what part # is needed for replacement. This is perfectly fine, but it does get a bit stupid crazy when you get down to it.

CMOS:



You also have easy access to the CMOS battery on this laptop. If you have the unit for an extended period of time, this will need to be replaced. This small battery keeps the time for your BIOS and also keeps your specific bios changes when the unit if off.

Layered PCB:



I thought I would take a quick snapshot of the laptop and point out that if you do need to tear down the laptop and replace a part internally, it appears that the PCB is layered or stacked. Layered boards are by no means "bad" but it does mean that putting them back together are just that much harder.

Outside the g60-507dx:

Externally you will first notice that the laptop has a protective shield for the top cover. I'm not going to get into the different peripherals on this laptop, please refer to the user guide

Keyboard:





Upon opening the unit and taking off the keyboard cover you see a full size keyboard with a full keypad (or a darn close full size keyboard). Keyboard is quick and responsive and not "mushy" or soft by any means at all. The Fn key is also to the right of the Ctrl key which is very nice (IBM's / Lenovo's refuse to conform to this for some reason)

The Fn keys seem to be on the top row of the keyboard (F1 - F12 and then down to the right. It's going to take some time to get used to compared to my Acer, but this is by no means bad.

Touch pad:

The touch pad is smooth to the touch, and is made out of the same plastic as the palm rests. You will also notice that the touch pad and buttons are recessed into the plastic, this seems to be the design for most HP laptops in the last year or so.

I took the time to disable the scroll feature on the right side of the touch pad. Personal preference I suppose, I just find it annoying.

Stickers:




The left side also included some stickers of the various hardware components. One nice thing HP did is that they did not use very strong glue / adhesive with these stickers! They easily come off, and do not require any goo-gone to clean the surface.

LCD Screen:

The LCD screen is brighter than my Acer, and has a max resolution of 1366x768 (16:9). Much else to say about the screen other than it looks nice, especially for 200.00


Bios:



Above are pictures from the bios options on this laptop. According to the laptop this bios was installed on 9/11/2009, so the laptop has not been in production very long.

Please also note that the laptop is SLIC 2.1 compatible! I'm not going to dig into this too much but do some searching on the web, and this means that the bios is fully windows 7 compatible across all versions. Read further below for screenshots of the slic table using slic dump toolkit.

Startup Menu:



By hitting Esc on the keyboard during post it gives you several options to select from.

F1 System Information
F2 System Diagnostics
F9 Boot Device Options
F10 Bios Setup
F11 System Recovery (D2D)
F12 Network Boot (if enabled)

Enter - Continue Startup

For more information, please visit: http://www.hp.com/go/techcenter/startup


System Diagnostics:



The system diagnostics are built into the bios and include the follow options.

F1 System Information
F2 Start-up Test
F3 Run-in Test
F4 Hard Disk Test
F11 Error Log
Esc Exit

It's nice to see HP follow Dell's lead and include hardware diagnostics into the bios instead of running it on a 3rd party disk.


Windows First Boot:

I've also included pictures of the step by step start up and configuration of Windows 7.

**Please note**

If you are a Linux user or wish to run your own operating system on this laptop you can get a refund of the price of the operating system and all software that came with the unit! Each manufacturer is different, but it requires that you do not accept the EULA or EVER boot into Windows 7. If you are looking for more info on this check out the links provided | Link 1 | Link 2.

I'm a huge Linux fan and prefer to run Ubuntu 9.10 on all my pc's, but because I picked up 2 laptops for Black Friday and my wife will be using 1 of them I decided to keep windows 7 on one of the laptops and have her accept the EULA. Meanwhile I will be going though the refund process starting Monday... expect a world of hurt and lots of "on hold" time (I'll keep you all posted on the progress of it as well)

On with the first boot pictures!



You will notice that the first thing you see is "Welcome to your new HP computer" The only option on the screen is go. I highly suggest you take a trick out of my playbook and hit Alt + F4 on your keyboard (not now as you read this obviously). This will close any current open windows or program running on your pc, and will bypass HP's proprietary startup registration and software.... besides who wants to "register" anyway!

Default installed programs:



Most companies include lots of "bloat" software to keep the costs down, and HP is no different. Below are some screen shots of the default installed programs that come with this HP laptop.



The only useful software that I saw included was the backup software and the light scribe software. In the past I would say DVD playback software, but Windows Vista / 7 include this out of the box now.

I also had very few windows updates to install (A total of I think 4?) This is partially due to the new OS.

I also took a look at the 3 dvd's HP burnt for me in the recovery partition and noticed that everything is now ".wim" format. This means you can mount the files with Alcohol 120% / 52% and view the contents. This is particularly useful if you want to downgrade to Windows XP but reinstall the support software that came with the laptop.

I have yet to install XP Pro on this laptop, but once I do I'll include a full set of drivers and support software in a how-to when the time comes.


Power Management Software:

The one downside to this laptop that I noticed was that there seems to be less power management software than I would like. You can turn off your wireless and turn down the brightness of your monitor, but the real "in depth" stuff seems to be missing.

On my Acer I could turn off everything from the Firewire ports to reduce the output of my graphics card (throttle it). This just seems to be lacking

SLIC Dump Toolkit 2.3 Final



Above is some screen shots of the SLIC Dump Toolkit.

Benchmarks:

Below are the bench marks for CPU-Z, BatteryMon, and HD Tune Pro

CPU-Z




BatteryMon




HD Tune Pro




Gaming performance:

Now don't laugh at me here, but I also installed Battlefield 2 / Team Fortress 2 / and World of Warcraft and I'm happy to report that they all run just fine. I was even surprised a bit at the performance of the Intel graphics card in BF2. Last time I reviewed my Acer I was having difficulty running the game due to 1GB of memory installed on medium settings.

Since my last review BF2 is now on 1.5 and finally supports wide screen support. I was able to play BF2 on medium settings across the board with low shadows and no Anti Aliasing.

CS:S / TF2 ran like a dream on the box with medium settings

WoW also ran just fine as well with high settings

I do not have any newer games to test out due to COD4:MWF2 failing to include any server based support for PC (so I boycotted the game... screw em). Any newer game don't expect much, remember it's an Intel graphics chipset, not anything higher.


Positives:

Price
Operating System (comes with Windows 7)
Minimal Bloat (not a ton of bloat included on the OS, but I do still suggest a wipe and reload)
Default Drivers for Windows 7 (Windows 7 found all the needed drivers out of the box with no searching or installing drivers off of hp's site)
SLIC 2.1 compatible bios (great news that it is SLIC 2.1 compatible! If you don't know what this means carry on )

Negatives:
No recovery disks included
Lack of APCI settings / software
No easy access to cooling module or CPU

Not a whole lot to say about this laptop when it comes to the negative. The price fits, and personally I can't believe I got this laptop for under 200.00. I'll get it for even less when I get a check back from HP for the cost of the Operating System and bundled software.

Overall rating of this laptop would be a 7.5 out of 10.

I hope you enjoyed my review. If you have any questions about the laptop please by all means feel free to post here or PM me.

Thanks!

-=SSX=-