Others say...

"HP Pavilion DV9623CL refurbished laptop"
I bought this refurbished laptop at a really good price, $700 USD. It had a lot of features at this price, including two 120gb hard drives, 17" widescreen, bluetooth, media center remote, a decent dual core processor and 2gb of ram.

I had never previously bought a refurbished product before, but it was in pretty much brand new condition and functioned like new. For the price, you would be hard pressed to find something with these sort of specs.

The laptop itself runs smoothly for office applications, and web browsing. Although the graphics card has no dedicated memory, Solidworks runs fine with larger 3D models. There was also no problems running Adobe Creative suite.

Although I would imagine the laptop would not be perfect for high end gaming due to the graphics card being fairly standard, but then again I would just buy a console or a desktop for the price difference anyway.

So in summary:

pro's:
-Excellent laptop for the price
-Excellent for everyday office use and good enough for 3D applications and ram intensive programs such as photoshop.
-Widescreen has heaps of screen real estate
-Media center capabilities and remote
-Decent battery life
-Looks damn good

con's:
-Have not tested with high end games, but most probably not suitable with no dedicated graphics memory
-Vista is a little slow on start up, but once you delete a few programs and clean it up, the laptop is a dream

Overall I would highly recommend this laptop for everyone, except maybe the hardcore gamer. But then again the hardcore gamer would not be looking at a laptop at this price, rather one that is a lot more expensive. I am a transport designer so have used a range of programs at home and at the office and the laptop has been reliable and a real pleasure to have.

"Terrible, stay away!"
I own this laptop and have been completely disappointed with it. It randomly crashes and resets (this may be a Vista thing), often the touch pad cuts out, and worst of all, it is SLOW! I develop games and require good 3D support. I figured getting a laptop with an NVidia card would give me good performance. I was completely wrong. This has the worst graphical performance of any laptop I've owned in the past 3 years, including laptops with on-board cards.

I've been disappointed with HP in the past and I should have listened to myself when I doubted buying another HP. Do yourself a favor and avoid this laptop. Even a laptop with an integrated gfx chip will run faster for any graphical application.

"Poor construction, poor customer service"
HP Pavilion series are not robust, and customer service is poor. The case is plastic and flimsy. Additionally the mother board is thin and tends to crack. There are numerous complaints on the web regarding the power input shorting in a few months due to the mother board cracking around the power input.

Our Pavilion laptop plastic case around the screen cracked 11 months after purchase. It took 5 hours on phone with customer service in India to arrange the laptop to be sent in under warrantee. Warrantee repair involves shipping the laptop by UPS to a repair center.

We recieved computer back from the repair service, and it died 2 weeks later, a week out of warrantee. We had a local repair service have a look at it, and the mother board was too weak with too many cracks to repair. Cost to repair would be $650. We chose to purchase a Dell instead.

We will not be buying another HP product. I have never had a more problematic computer.

"A good XP laptop. Unfortunately it comes with Vista."
This is my third and final update of my review of this laptop (I swear!). After a year of nothing but trouble with Vista Home Premium it is now running very well on Windows XP MCE 2005. It runs 10x faster now, eventhough I lost a GB of RAM in the changeover (XP can only use 3 GB of the 4 GB I installed). I still get an occasional BSOD but nothing like the "unexpected problems," driver issues and CPU overload I had with Vista. Clearly this is an XP laptop that was kludged into a Vista machine. If you're having any problems with Vista at all I strongly suggest a downgrade to XP MCE. You'll need to install drivers for your SATA hard drives that don't come with XP, but they're readily available, and there are plenty of instructions on the Web on how to do the change (including on HP's own forums - do you think they know this laptop is c--p running Vista?). I wish I had done this a year ago instead of trying to make Vista work, it's hopeless. With XP this laptop is a perfectly good, very powerful machine. Grab it at a deep discount, install XP MCE and enjoy.

"biggest mistake this year"
my computer came with this program i couldn't get off it. its called vista.

all i feel is rage. whoever is responisible for making this computer all i have to say is this:


i'm glad i got this computer, it helped me realize how much better apple is.