My HP Customer Service Nightmare is over

So HP came through and did the right thing.

I will applaud HP for stepping up and delivering good on their customer service. Though it did take some time for them to do it, they did replace my problematic dv5030us and they deserve credit for it.

They replaced it with a dv6345us. It is a relatively nice system, despite the downgrade in graphics from the dv5030us. However, ATI's drivers are so bad that it really doesn't make a real world difference in terms of performance. I will say that, for a system that retails for nearly $1100 on HP's own website, and the SIZE of the system (it's THICK), intergrated graphics are disappointing.

Compared to the dv5030us, it looks 10x nicer. It has a nice overall modern design. Where the dv5030us looked like something that would have been sold earlier in this century. It still doesn't look as good as my MacBook though. Not to mention the system is thicker than both the MacBook and the dv5030us. It's a little too thick.

Battery life is a very nice improvement over the "lucky to get 2 hours" dv5030us. But, as you expected me to say, it still falls about an hour short of the MacBook with wireless on and more than 2.5 hours short without wireless.

Sound quality. This is a big issue for me, as I love music. The integrated sound on the dv5030us was downright horrible. It had noticeable amounts of clipping, distortion, it was fatiguing and it performed terrible in multimedia applications. I purchased a now useless Audigy 2 ZS Notebook and it was a moderate improvement, but still fatiguing. Creative generally makes junk soundcards and MP3 players, but it was an improvement. The dv6345us sounds significantly better than the dv5030us and Audigy 2. It's not fatiguing, it's relatively clear, but a little bass heavy. Overall its pretty good. But, again, not quiet up to what the Mac offers. Thankfully, OS X doesn't resample sound. So you get a nice untouched audio signal. The Mac is cleaner than both and offers a nice flat and natural response. The iPod improves upon the Mac and sounds better than all of the hardware I've mentioned, but thats another story.

The screen quality is exactly the same as the dv5030us. Which is disappointing, really. It's not very sharp, not nearly as bright or colorful as my MacBook, and generally hard to see in some situations, with noticeable ghosting in some games. Where the MacBook on full brightness can be seen in all situations and does not have any ghosting issues.

Software? came loaded with junk. Thankfully it had the Vista Upgrade Anytime DVD. Windows Vista is definitely a step down from Windows XP. While both are a huge step down from OS X. I've already had Vista crash on me 3 times just by pressing the "DVD" button on the remote to bring up the DVD menu while playing a DVD, where HP's "Quickplay" crashed 4 of the 5 times I tried it.

One nice thing I can say about it is that it came with a large and fast 160GB HDD. I promptly took that out, after I ran all kinds of tests to make sure the hardware was stable and spent the HOUR it took to create the backup DVDs, and put it in my MacBook. OS X boots up in 22.74 seconds now

Overall, I'm happy with the way things worked out. It's a shame that it took so much trouble to finally get a working system.

So I will continue to purchase HP products. Well, their printers and such. However, they will have to start offering alternatives to Windows before I will consider their PCs again. I've been spoiled by a modern operating system and don't ever intend to downgrade back to Windows.

 

Glad to hear they finally replaced it. How about processor performance? Do you notice any significant increase over the previous unit?

 

I would have to disagree with the OP's assessment of sound quality on the dv5xxx series and on the the dv6xxx series. I had a dv5000 and it sounds better than the current dv6200 that I have now. Also, I liked that the speakers were along the front edge on the dv5000 versus below the display on the dv6200, that way I could close the lid and not muffle the sound and the sound is directed towards me instead of up at the ceiling.

 

I agree about the speaker placement on the two models. I have no idea why they moved them up along the keyboard.

 

For multi-tasking its a bit better.

I didn't run too many "speed tests".

Super Pi to 1 million digits on the dv5030us with a Turion64 ML-37 and 1MB of L2 cache would do it in about 46 seconds. The dv6345us with the Core 2 Duo T5300 and 2MB of L2 cache did it in 36 seconds. My MacBook with a Core 2 Duo T7200 and 4MB of L2 cache did it in less than 26 seconds.

Encoding some video in Nero to H.264 took almost 16 minutes on the Turion, just under 15 on the T5300, and just over 8 on the MacBook.

The single core Turions were a lot faster than people give them credit for. The dv6345us is a moderate improvement in speed. The MacBook, however, is a huge increase in speed over the two HP systems.

The dv6345us is a good system. But for something that costs only $200 less than the MacBook with DVD burner, the performance is pretty disappointing.

The Vista Performance Index is also vastly different. The GPU on the MacBook, an Intel GMA950, scores 3.6 and 3.8. While the GMA950 on the dv6345us scores 2.2 and 2.1.

I forgot to mention I was talking about the headphone out. The headphone out on the dv5030us was one of the worst I've ever heard. The dv6345us is a significant step up from the previous system AND the Audigy 2 ZS, but still well behind the MacBook and even farther behind the iPod. The speakers are relatively irrelevant because I always use headphones or external speakers.

 

Wow, that is a big difference. It scores around the mid-level GeForce Go range on the MacBook. Go figure.

 

Creative make junk soundcards and mp3 players? lol I have to disagree on that! They make junk mice (fatal1ty 1010 is a prime example) but never have I had problems with any soundcard or mp3 player i got from Creative, nor has any1 I know. Granted no product doesnt have faults but junk? I don think so.

The vista performance index is a very odd one indeed, doesnt always make sense and appears to be quite inaccurate at times

 

Yep, Glad to hear HP did good by you

 

I heard Creative had lots of trouble with vista drivers and support for older cards. In fact, from the news articles I read, they sound even worse than nvidia about vista support for their hardware. That makes me nervous about buying their products as I don't want to have to plunk down big bucks for upgrades because the manufacturer won't support older products.

 

I would like to tell people that I have found out oh to fix a webcam problem on my HP DV64000, problem was the cam kept on being not connected and HP tech support never found out the problem after 2 months if you ask me tech support is a waste. Goto http://www.sonix.com.tw/sonix/family.do?f=3 and download SN9C250 it automatically loads it fully all the time and gives you face tracking....slow but its there.