HP Pavilion dv6500 Battery |
Posted: March 1, 2015 |
The casing is made of a sturdy plastic. The build is durable, there’s a slight amount of flex on the palm rests if you push in hard, but nothing that will sink under the light downward pressure of one’s palms. The lid offers adequate protection, push in and you’ll find some ripples on the LCD — it’s not as convincing as say the mag-alloy ThinkPad lid but more than serviceable. Just don’t sit on it while it’s in your backpack and there will be no worries. One thing that struck me about the V100 is that it’s not as light as you might think, and it shouldn’t be classified as an ultraportable (an ultraportable is a 1.0″ or thinner notebook that weighs under 4lbs). With the 6-cell battery it weighs about 4.4 lbs, which is most definitely portable and easy to carry, but 1.5lbs more than the ThinkPad X60s and nowhere near as wonderfully thin as that notebook. Of course, you get a built-in optical drive and other goodies with the V100 that aren’t on the X60s, so you trade weight for features. Whenever you think of a 12.1-inch screen laptop you start thinking about low voltage processors, and sacrificing performance for the size. This isn’t necessarily the case with the V100. The V100 I have configured with a 2.0 GHz Core Duo processor is much faster than past generation 12.1″ screen notebooks. It’s slightly faster than its cousin ThinkPad X60s notebook that has a low voltage Core Duo processor. Factor in the 1.0GB of memory this V100 has and the decent 5400RPM hard drive and things move along very well. If you prefer to save money and go with a lower end processor, such as Core Solo, that option is available to you with the V100 Let’s look at some benchmarks to see how the V100 stacks up against fellow notebooks (all benchmarks are done using the stock system setup, no Windows reinstall or removal of programs).You can see that the Core Duo processor adds some impressive performance gains over the older Pentium M. Notice the 12.1″ screen M1210 was quite a bit higher with its PCMark number, the fact the M1210 used had dedicated nVidia graphics helped it to outpace the V100.It’s not really fair to compare the V100 against other notebooks with dedicated graphics cards, but just for the fun of it and to demonstrate the V100 is most definitely not a notebook that can be used for demanding games, here are the 3DMark performance numbers: The V100 sports a widescreen XGA display with a glossy screen finish. Most consumer notebooks these days have the glossy screen finish, it provides for richer bolder colors and a better media viewing experience. If you’re in an office or home with strong overhead lighting though, beware of the reflections you’ll get on the screen — this is demonstrated in the picture below:Overall, despite the reflection issues with a glossy display I’m a fan of the richer colors you’ll get. It was a good choice for Lenovo to offer this. The V100 display is overall pretty good. It could be a notch brighter in my opinion, it’s not as bright as some competing 12.1″ notebooks such as the Dell XPS M1210. Also, the vertical viewing angles are quite poor, you’ll have to choose a perpendicular angle of viewing to get the best screen coloration. Horizontal viewing angles are quite good though. Light leakage is minimal, but there is some at the bottom of the screen.The V100 speakers are located at the very front of the notebook. The speakers are actually not too bad, the loudness is good and clarity decent as well. I was surprised to have even adequate speakers on this sized notebook. They’re leaps and bounds better than the ThinkPad X60s 12.1″ screen notebook that has a speaker located on the bottom side. Still, if you want what can be called very good sound you’ll need headphones or external speakers to plug into the line-out port on the left hand side. The V100 is a very quiet system that stays nice and cool. Even when running benchmark applications on this notebook things didn’t really warm up and the fan was either inaudible or didn’t need to kick in. High marks go to the designers for making a notebook that has a good cooling system. Ever since using an Apple MacBook that runs at 140 F in normal usage, which is apparently considered normal to longtime Apple notebook users, I’m more appreciative of notebooks that don’t cook your lap when used.
Despite the fact we’re dealing with a smal 12.1″ screen notebook, the keyboard on the V100 is full sized. Except for the “Home” and “End” key, all of the major keys are there with dedicated buttons you’d usually use. The top row of keys is slightly undersized to fit properly, but still very usable. The feel of the keyboard is good, it’s firm overall with a very slight amount of flex on the bottom right side — you have to push hard to discover it though. The keyboard is “ThinkPad like” but not as good or the same feel in my opinion. The touch of the keys seems somewhat lighter and the travel not quite as far or as pleasing. On both sides of the chassis one can see several hotkeys that aid in the use of the laptop. On the left side, there is a CD Audio launcher and standard CD playback buttons (play/pause, stop, etc). The CD Audio launcher will launch Windows Media Player if computer is on, or will play CD Audio without the Operating System if system is off. On the right side, one can find buttons for Power4Gear (power settings), Bluetooth, Splendid Video Technology (changes screen contrast), wireless connectivity, and for the touch pad. However to be able to use these buttons require extra processes to be running. I found that I had use for only the Power4Gear and Bluetooth buttons so I disabled the other processes. The drive is noisy when speeding up, and when running at full speed. Toshiba provides a program to slow down the speed, thus making it nearly silent. It is only useful if you want minimum performance from the drive. I tried turning it on when loading a program, and it reduced the loading time considerably. I also noticed that some applications lag a bit when the drive speeds up. Overall, I find the keyboard and touchpad to be well placed. There is noticeable flexing in the keyboard when it is used normally, but is not too bad. There is a numeric mode to overlay a number pad on the keyboard. The touchpad works well too. Tapping on the keypad acts as the left mouse button, which I find useful. The buttons below the touchpad are also well-placed and not stiff. However, a scroll button would have been a good feature. Toshiba provides some interesting software for the touchpad. With one program, you can set it up so a motion of your finger from each of the 4 corners can open up different files, folders etc. There is no parallel port, but it doesn t really make a difference to me. There is only an SD card reader on this notebook. I know some other notebooks have a multiple card reader, but again this wasn t an important feature for me. My digital camera uses xD picture cards anyway, and I haven t seen a notebook that supports this format yet.
A feature I found particularly cool on this notebook is the monitor-in port. The notebook comes with an adaptor cable to connect a composite video and audio left/right input at one end, and connect it into an input port on the laptop which looks like a headphone jack.Wifi is supported via the integrated Intel 2200bg card, which is easily accessible as I mentioned above. There is a wireless indicator by the keyboard, and an ON/OFF switch. Unfortunately, I haven t been able test the wifi yet, but I will once I start school again. I am not sure if this laptop has Bluetooth. The stock battery is a 6-cell Lithium Ion (Li-ion) 10.8V x 4400mAh capacity. The battery life on this notebook depends greatly on what you re doing, the display brightness etc. I managed about 4 hours with the long-life mode at 600 MHz, without the wifi on, doing word processing and listening to music some of the time. If you play games, run the processor at full speed etc. it lowers the life. I don t have any programs to benchmark the battery life. However, it was suggested that a good test is to run a looping MP3 playlist with the screen brightness on its highest level. Since I find the brightest screen setting overly bright, I ran a looping MP3 playlist on Winamp 5.04 at half brightness and the battery lasted about 3 hours. Again, this test was done at 600 MHz without wifi on. These readings are decent, but could be a bit better. I recommend a second normal battery, or Toshiba s high-capacity batter (double that of the normal one) if you don t have any access to a plug for the day.
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