New dv6338se question

Hi all,

I just got a new dv6338se from best buy and i've been playing around with vista for a few days. I upped the RAM to 2 gigs but it still feels much slower then xp on my dv2000t. I installed world of warcraft on it and it runs horribly. I wasn't expecting it to run incredibly but I at least thought it would be playable. my question is should I just do a fresh format and reinstall of xp. Will that speed up the laptop considerably? Also if I wanted to revert back to vista will the hp restore discs do that even if xp is installed? Thanks in advance.

 

I am thinking about buying this same computer from BB....Can you tell me anymore about how you like it, was it easy too update for new bios and software updates... Does it run Vista good, did you have too add and extra gb of memory for requirements or did it run ok on 1 gb....Anything you can tell me will help me make decision.... Do you like the amd processor...How long is the battery life when charged wtih the 12 cell?

thanks, sheldon

 

FOr the price the deal is really incredible. It was running vista fine with 1gb, but since i was gonna be using this for photoshop i upped the memory to 2gb, There's no doubt that vista has much better power management. I got 6 hours of useage out of a full charge with wireles going and a wireless mouse attached. It should go up after a few cycles too. My only gripe is that there's so much bloatware installed on top of a kinda slugish OS. Which is why I'm asking about xp. I have a hankering that this little thing would fly with xp on it. But I would have no problems recomending this laptop at this price to anyone.

 

I just purchased this laptop about a week ago as well.

Installing XP on this would definitely make it fly due to the fact that XP taxes the memory a lot less from what I would assume. The recovery CDs are basically a factory image of what the laptop had on it when you bought it so I believe also that the CDs might allow you to revert back to Vista, but you would lose everything else. You can order recovery CDs but the standard is that the hard drive is partitioned with the recovery data on one partition of the hard drive.

The price for such a neat machine is a STEAL! It's fantastic at running Vista and it's very quiet. 1 GB is sufficient RAM to run Vista. I may upgrade to 2 GBs in the near future though. I like the AMD processor. I have always had computers running AMD and I have nothing bad to say about them. They are also a bit cheaper than Intel. The battery life is superior, I get about 5 hours off of the 12 cell battery. I can't wait to see how long it's going to last on a long plane trip because I am going to Hawaii very soon. One thing that's cool about this notebook is that it has two headphone jacks which are beneficial for two people who want to watch a DVD. I have not had to update the BIOS yet so I couldn't tell you very much about how easy it is to update the BIOS.

If you are not a heavy gamer, this is the notebook for you. The DV6338se features the Nvidia Geforce GO 6150 which is definitely not for the latest and greatest games, but if you aren't very anal about how your games look, than it is a good integrated graphics solution. It's definitely an improvement over the Intel integrated graphics, which are terrible IGPs from what I've seen. This is mainly why the notebook was so cheap. If it had a fully dedicated graphics card, than this sure as heck wouldn't be $899. But it's a fine graphics solution for if you're only going to do light gaming once in a while, watching DVDs, and other things like web surfing that won't take a dedicated graphics card to do these activities.

I'm very happy with my purchase overall. This is a steal, you're not going to find a nice notebook like this for a price of only $899.

 

I picked up mine today and it's going back tomorrow. While reinstalling Vista definitely sped up the computer significantly, it was still rather slow and the bottom gets too hot to use on your lap (kinda defeats the purpose of a LAPtop). The extended life battery is a plus to have if you want to work for 6 hours without a recharge, but it is simply too big.

 

Vista's memory management learns what programs you use often and allocates more memory to those than others. The true speed of Vista is often revealed a few weeks after using it.

I wouldn't dream of going back to XP!

 

maybe you got a lemon or something because i have this exact same laptop from bestbuy and mine runs world of warcraft 15-20 fps and in inside areas 30-40 fps maybe you have the power option set to power save because i notice if i have it set to power save the preformance is horrible but on high preformance it does very well and i only use 1GB of ram