Customer Reviews

HP Pavilion dv7-6165us Entertainment Notebook Computer - Silver

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

First off, I am a HUGE gamer, and finding a decent enough laptop that can handle new games with ease for a price easy on the pocket is definitely difficult.
This, my friends, is probably the best one you could find.
My old laptop I bought 3 years ago and had for 2-and-a-half years was an HP Pavilion dv7 that was one of the higher-end models for about $1100. It worked very well, even with an integrated video card, but after having it replaced 4 times under the warranty, I decided it was time to move on.
I searched high and low, and was originally going to buy the now top of the line dv7 model, but figured I couldn't afford it.
Then, I found this one, and I just knew it was perfect.

AMD's A8-3500m may seem like a lower-end quad core processor compared to Intel's i7, but it by far makes up with it by having a very strong gpu. That by itself is rated to perform as well as a Radeon 5650, which isn't too shabby. The processor runs very well compared to my old Intel 2.4 dual-core, but if you've been on an i7, or even an i5 quad-core, you'll notice the difference in performance.

Throw in a dedicated 1GB Radeon 6750, and you're looking at a hefty bit of graphics for games and media. For all those wondering EXACTLY what you can throw at this thing, I can play Witcher 2 on all high settings with all effects turned on at MAX 1600x900 resolution and it runs beautifully. I haven't tried the ultra settings yet, but I have a feeling that's where it would start to stutter. Borderlands, Arkham Asylum, New Vegas, Just Cause 2, and Sims 3 all run outstandingly well. EDIT - I RECENTLY PURCHASED ALIENS VS. PREDATORS FROM STEAM, WHICH IS A GAME CAPABLE OF BEING RUN IN DX11. THE GAME RUNS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING IN DX11 MODE WITH MAX RESOLUTION AND SETTINGS, EVEN IN MULTIPLAYER/ONLINE MODE, AND MY INTERNET REALLY SUCKS.

Now for the pros and cons.

PROS: AMAZING graphical performance. Compared to the high-end dv7 model with i7 and Radeon 6770 for $1100, you get more graphics power with the A8.

AMD's Catalyst control center offers a lot of performance and power-saving options. You can enable/disable Cross-fire (Which utilizes both the graphics power of the processor and the dedicated card) and tweak a lot of the graphics settings, such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic levels. (My boyfriend has an i5 desktop, and his options for performance and power-saving are very limited.)

You can set the range for the clock speed you want your cores to run. You can lower it all the way down to 800mHz, from 1000 to 1300mHz, at 1500mHz all the time, or however you want. The intervals are set from about 100-200mHz and you're free to play around with it all you want. You can even set separate ranges for when it's on AC power and when it's running off the battery. Very handy if you use the battery a lot and aren't using graphics/processor-intensive programs, or if all you do is intensive stuff. The auto-clock seems to run very well and quite consistently. (My boyfriend's i5 will jump from 1.5 and stay at 3-4, even if all he's running is Skype. It seems to bounce all over the place.)

You can set which programs you want to run at high-performance and which you want to run at power-saving levels. It's very easy to figure out, and I picked up how to change settings fairly quickly. A new user can easily customize their settings.

64-bit Windows 7 runs smoothly and quickly...for the most part (More on that in cons). Startup is fast, and desktop loads even quicker so long as you don't have any startup programs other than the ones needed.

Beautiful, clear, 17", 720p, 1600x900 display.

640GB hard drive runs quickly, even at 5400 rpm.

The disk drive is whisper quiet. After two laptops with noisy/vibrating drives, it's extremely nice.

The built-in webcam works EXTREMELY WELL in low light, and even if there's no light on at all! Even with the screen dimmed, or on a dark background, it still works terrific.

The speakers sound really nice, but you can't tell that there's even a subwoofer on the bottom of this thing. There is definitely some bass to it, but any home speaker system could outdo it. They don't sound too much different from my old laptop's speakers, which I thought sounded pretty good, too.

Keyboard takes a bit to get used to, but I really, really like it. It feels very comfortable to type on and the keys are responsive. My only gripe is that the arrow keys are oddly sized, with the left & right being very large and the top & bottom are squished and small. The caps lock key also lights up when active, but the num lock key doesn't. Not that big of a deal, but I thought it was a little inconsistent.

Multi-gesture touch pad, which is somewhat responsive. EDIT - I ALSO WOULD LIKE TO ADD THAT WHILE TYPING, IT'S NIGH IMPOSSIBLE TO SWIPE YOUR HAND OVER THE TOUCHPAD. IT'S VERY NICE FOR TYPING, AS YOU DON'T ACCIDENTALLY CLICK SOMETHING OR MOVE THE MOUSE ELSEWHERE. THIS MAKES IT SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO THROUGH THE HASSLE OF TURNING OFF THE TOUCHPAD EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO USE A SEPARATE MOUSE OR ARE DOING EXTENSIVE TYPING.

Fingerprint scanner is a neat touch, but it's not something I would really use. It says you can use it to log onto websites, but I can't figure out how to do this. There's a basic menu that you can use to create hotkeys to quickly open websites with the touch of a finger, but it seems a bit of a hassle. If your browser is already open, and you swipe a finger to open a website, it will open an entirely new window, instead of a new tab. A bit of a nuisance. I also found it very difficult to get it to correctly scan my other fingers. The index finger was the only one that I could get easily.

The 9-volt battery offers a lengthy life. On high-performance settings, and even while playing a game, I got around 4-and-a-half hours out of it. On power-saving settings with relatively simple programs (Browsing, music), it's double that--around 8-9 hours.

The laptop stays fairly cool compared to other laptops I've used, even while playing a game at high settings.

The f keys and the media controls are switched. So, if you want to use the f keys like normal, you have to press the fn (Function) key. It takes a bit to train yourself to remember that, but I like it much more than the other way around. Very useful if you listen to lots of music. My old laptop had separate touch controls, and I was very sad to see they weren't implementing them anymore. This is a fine-enough compromise.

CONS (I know. We're just now getting to the cons. That's how amazing this thing is.): Processor could be considered a little weak compared to Intel's i5 and i7.

No Blu-Ray. This means nothing to me, but seeing as how it's pretty much standard for laptops nowadays, it could be a disappointment for some people not to have it on this one.

Screen isn't 1080p. Again, doesn't mean anything to me, but I've seen it being implemented a lot more. However, having 1080p usually marks the price up on a laptop quite a bit, so I doubt you could even find one with it at this range.

Speakers sound pretty nice, but are nowhere near what HP constantly boasts about.

Touchpad - Multi-gestures work half the time at best. The two-finger scrolling is a terrible substitute for a small section on the side to be used for scrolling. I can't for the life of me get the two-finger drag to scroll correctly. It's very finicky. The zoom gesture works just okay, but I find myself often zooming in or out on a page when I'm trying to scroll. The touchpad buttons are also very noisy! A very loud click. Normally, I could handle it fine, but I'll get to it later on how it's absolutely terrible. Also, there is no simple, quick way to disable the touchpad. On my old laptop, there was a handy button right on top that you could click. On my mom's you could do fn-f9 and quickly disable it. With this, you have to open the touchpad software through the menu on the taskbar and disable it that way. A hassle if you're in a game, but otherwise not much more than that--a hassle. EDIT - THE TOUCHPAD IS VERY DIFFICULT TO BRUSH AGAINST WHILE TYPING, AND I'VE NEVER ENDED UP ACCIDENTALLY CLICKING OR MOVING THE MOUSE, SO TURNING IT OFF IS NOT NEEDED AT ALL.

Built-in webcam - It runs mostly the same as it did on my old laptop, but both my boyfriend (Who I cam chat with often) and I have noticed that there are lines going through the video. It almost looks like a grid of some sort, and though it's not terrible looking, it makes it look worse than my old laptop's camera. The camera also seems to reset itself, which my old laptop's did as well. It will turn off for a quick second, and then turn back on. I don't know why it does this. It could just be Skype. However, the camera has a great range and picks up a pretty large area. Even sitting close, it shows a lot around me. EDIT - THE GRID LINES APPEAR ONLY WHILE USING SKYPE VIDEO CHAT. USING MSN'S VIDEO CHAT WORKS PERFECTLY WITH NO LINES. THIS MEANS IT'S NOT THE CAMERA, BUT THE SOFTWARE ITSELF.

Built-in microphone - Let me just start by saying that I used a Rock Band mic as my main microphone. (I'll not go into extreme detail as to how I used it while playing games, but let's just say it entailed me stuffing it down my shirt.) The built-in mic on my old laptop was pretty crappy, and when I was forced to use my mom's laptop after mine broke, I still used the Rock Band mic. I thought with this new laptop that I could just use the built-in one, and at first, my boyfriend said it sounded fantastic. As soon as I started typing, however...he said it was like I was thumping on a dead body right in his ear. The mic picks up keyboard sounds very easily, and the touchpad is even worse! I could hear everything feeding back through my boyfriend's mic from his speakers because it was so loud. Clicking was a really loud sound that annoyed us both. Even lightly tapping with my fingers on the far end of the laptop's base, my boyfriend said it was a loud, heavy, thumping noise coming through his end. I went back to using the Rock Band mic stuffed down my shirt, and my boyfriend says he can't hear my typing or any clicking and that my voice sounds 10x better. If you don't type or use the touchpad while talking to people with it, it sounds just fine.

LED HP logo - There is a circular HP logo on the bottom-right side of the laptop lid that lights up. It shines very brightly, and during the night, it makes the whole room light up quite a bit. There is no way to disable it as far as I know. Nothing in the BIOS, no setting anywhere. I've resorted to putting a book on top of it at night, but that part of the lid is scooped, so it doesn't work very well. Definitely annoying if you leave it on in your room at night.

Windows 7 - First off, I'm very biased against Windows 7. I know everyone hated Vista with a passion, but I loved it. I honestly thought it was better than anything else I've used. I had it on my old laptop and I loved it to death, slowness and all. Granted, it's very slow, but it ran EVERYTHING I threw at it. ALL of my old games ran just fine without having to tamper with settings and firewalls. However, with 7, it's such a pain. I can't get Mass Effect to work past the menu screen after trying just about everything, older games run poorly or I have to play with the settings and properties so much to get it to work. For games, 7 just doesn't cut it. Even for regular tasks, it seems to have issues running setups and other programs. I'll click on an .exe setup file and it will take a long time to load. (Vista was the same, however. XP opened it instantly.) Steam also has issues with 7 in that it will freeze up often. EDIT - MASS EFFECT NOW WORKS. IT TURNS OUT THAT THERE WAS A PROBLEM WITH THE ANTIALIASING SETTING. HOWEVER, I'VE BEEN HAVING OTHER ISSUES WITH 7 WHICH I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIX AS OF YET.

Most of the cons are more nuisances than anything. Nothing major enough to really detract from the amazing-ness of this laptop, so long as you have something else to use or do to work around it. For this price, the amount of features and power of the components makes this laptop a STEAL! I HIGHLY recommend this product to anyone who wants a gaming/entertainment laptop at an excellent price. You will not be disappointed.

EDIT - AFTER OWNING THE LAPTOP FOR ROUGHLY A MONTH NOW, I'VE DECIDED TO EXPAND ON SOME THINGS I'VE COVERED EARLIER, AND ALSO OFFER ADVICE ON SETTINGS YOU SHOULD CHANGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER PURCHASE.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN BUYING THIS LAPTOP - DON'T RUN ALL GAMES AT THE MAX ANTI-ALIASING LEVEL OF 16X. I HAD A COUPLE GAMES WHICH WOULD NOT RUN CORRECTLY WHEN YOU REACHED A CERTAIN POINT IN THE MENU OR START OF GAME (NAMELY BORDERLANDS AND MASS EFFECT) AND WHEN I TURNED IT DOWN, THEY RAN PERFECTLY. IF THE GAME RUNS WELL AT 16X, YOU SHOULDN'T NEED TO CHANGE IT UNLESS YOU START HAVING PROBLEMS.

WHEN I INITIALLY STARTED USING THE LAPTOP, I WAS HAVING TROUBLE WITH AUDIO COMING THROUGH THE SPEAKERS INSTEAD OF MY EARBUDS, AND AUDIO COMING THROUGH BOTH MY SPEAKERS AND MY EARBUDS AT THE SAME TIME. AFTER SEARCHING FOR THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM, I FOUND THAT IN THE PLAYBACK DEVICES THROUGH THE SOUND OPTIONS, IT LISTS COMMUNICATIONS HEADPHONES AND SPEAKERS AND HEADPHONES. IF YOU'RE HAVING THE SAME AUDIO PROBLEM, DISABLE THE COMMUNICATIONS HEADPHONES ENTIRELY AND SET SPEAKERS AND HEADPHONES TO THE DEFAULT DEVICE. HAVEN'T HAD A PROBLEM SINCE.

THERE IS AN AUTOMATIC SCREEN DIM SETTING THAT CHANGES THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE SCREEN ACCORDING TO WHAT TYPE OF WINDOW YOU'RE LOOKING AT. FOR INSTANCE, A WINDOW WITH A WHITE BACKGROUND WILL BRIGHTEN THE SCREEN, WHILE A DARK BACKGROUND WILL DIM IT. IF THIS BOTHERS YOU, WHICH IT EASILY DID TO ME, THEN YOU CAN TURN IT OFF. I DID ONCE I FOUND THE OPTION FOR IT, AND IT WORKED MUCH BETTER, HOWEVER, I FOR THE LIFE OF ME CANNOT FIND THE SETTING FOR IT NOW. IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE IN POWER OPTIONS-CHANGE PLAN SETTINGS-CHANGE ADVANCED SETTINGS, BUT IT'S NO LONGER LISTED. IT MAY HAVE BEEN REMOVED. I DO NOTICE THAT THE SCREEN WILL FLICKER AT TIMES AND RAPIDLY CHANGE BRIGHTNESSES WHILE BROWSING THE WEB OR SWITCHING WINDOWS. THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM WITH THE ACTUAL DISPLAY, AND I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIND A WAY TO CORRECT IT. IT SEEMS THE PROBLEM GETS WORSE THE LOWER THE BRIGHTNESS IS REGULARLY SET AT. I KEEP MINE PRETTY LOW BECAUSE IT'S MUCH TOO BRIGHT OTHERWISE, AND THIS MAKES THE PROBLEM WORSE.

TURN WINDOWS AERO OFF AND USE THE BASIC 7 DISPLAY. AERO CONSTANTLY CAUSES STEAM, SKYPE, FIREFOX, AND WINDOW SWITCHING TO BECOME VERY LAGGY AND EVEN FREEZE UP THE PROGRAM. AFTER TURNING IT TO 7 BASIC, AND ALSO TURNING OFF MOST WINDOW EFFECTS, IT RUNS MUCH SMOOTHER AND VERY RARELY STUTTERS.

THIS LAPTOP STILL AMAZES ME WITH ITS PERFORMANCE, PARTICULARLY IN GAMES AND MULTITASKING. AFTER A FEW BUMPS AT THE START AND A COUPLE CHANGES IN SETTINGS, THIS THING WILL BECOME YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND IN THE TECHNOLOGY WORLD.

Took me a long time to search to internet for a good a8-3500 laptop. This was the best one for the value and 100$ off of retail as well. Some things to consider.
1.Energy efficiency 11w idle - 20 average docs,webs, bursts to 60w load i think.
2.High end video card HD 6750M/6620g almost rated class 1 but rated at top of classs 2 [class 1 cards usually 1000$ range higher] and its 1600x900 resolution. Now thats nice combo, while others are lower resolution. This is by FAR best graphics+ resolution + efficient processor.
3. Plays lot modern games on High settings.
4. Amd cata suite says crossfire mode, havnt really messed with it. Laptop has sticker that says as well.
5. Battery lasts long anywhere from 2-9 hours depending on tasks. Games usually tend to drain battery in all laptops.
Cons
1. Vga+hdmi TOO CLOSE together cant run 2 monitors. Just bought for dual monitor with extra usb monitor total of 3.
Had to slice up my vga cord for it to work, since the head is to bulky. Works fine
Using samsung xl 2370 22"+ Acer S273HL bmii 27[hdmi works awesome doesnt screw up resolution]. They dont sell small head vga cables.
2. Annoying HP icon Lid light(bright white) always on when plugged in, cant be turned off or in bios[bios is generic, not much to customize], was hoping to turn off to make it more efficient energy.
Trackpad lights up as well, prety neat.

Other thoughts
Didnt realize this laptop was so BIG. Since its max resolution (1600 x 900).
Its shiny and silvery.
Wanted to buy the MX series clocked at 1.9x4 cores.
Not much BLOATware, easy to remove. Only bloatware is norton. I already gave
up on antivirus programs, havnt caught any virus's in long time on any of my machines, easy to catch and remove.

EDIT : 12/3/2011 Little side note PC Gaming. Can play Skyrim 1080p on my 27" monitor and a tv show on my tv only using
60% cpu usage, thats prety crazy I thought coming from laptop. Skyrim works on high quality but you need to tone down antialias/anisotropic Sample rates. Cross fire mode works GREAT. Only game I found enjoyable lately.
My poor intel i7 desktop gaming pc just built, collecting dust lately.

Other note, good to do a little research on AMD dual gpu chipsets, not all laptops are the same, while some have slower ones, while others have faster ones combined. AMD GPU/CPU chipset is awesome and its really energy efficient when its compared to my desktop [200+watts] while laptop at 45 watts at most with gaming.. I feel bad for intels HD Graphic chipset, VERY SUCKY! compared this, intel is best at CPUs while AMD owns BOTH graphic gpus + Cpus NICE COMBO! Intel laptop processors are nice if you're going to plan on using CPU intensive programs mainly.

Final note
BUY IT FAST its selling quick, I barely got my order in, bad habit of waiting, usually end up being sold out for me. EDIT: That was dumb, they restock this quite a bit...

Great laptop for the money. The specs are more than enough for the average user. The laptop power settings make it incredibly simple to manage your power correctly for whatever tasks you need to complete. There wasn't a bunch of junk software loaded on the machine and the beats audio is fantastic, you won't find better laptop speakers. I've just begun to really findout every feature of the laptop and am extremely satisfied with my purchase

My one and only pet peeve about this machine is the awkward battery shape, its great for setting it on a desk or table, but it is a little weird when the laptop's on your lap

I bought this item (Oct 28, 2011) and had it die a month later. As of this writing (Dec 21, 2011) I still have not gotten it back. The current due date for me to get it back is about 2 more weeks.

When the unit was working it was good enough and I was enjoying the experience. The fingerprint reader seems to stop working from time to time and only a hard restart (full shutdown/restart) will bring it back to life, but when it works, its really cool. I did have to uninstall the "Beats" audio driver as it is really just a fancy brand name over some cheesy equalization and audio effects and does not support ASIO. So those thinking of using this as a DAW based laptop, be aware of that. The "sub-woofer" is pretty much garbage and does nothing but I had no high expectations as this is a laptop after all.

What happened to me is a common issue. The unit turns on and then shuts itself off after a few seconds. Once it happened to me I found reports of this all over the internet. The usual fixes, hard resets, remove battery, etc did not work. the tech support is from India and it was sometimes hard to communicate with them and understand them, but they were helpful. Unfortunately the could not get my name right and mis-spelled it BADLY on their records. My name is NELSON and they spelled it MEOSONN.

After about 80 minutes on the phone, they determined I needed to send the unit back and they sent me a prepaid shipping box. There were a couple of important details that you should be aware of. They way the fix these things - according to the support crew - is by just replacing everything that needs it and unfortunately this usually means that the OS must be re-installed because when parts change, the OS requires it. Thus your installed apps will be wiped along with your data. You can request they backup your data, but if it is not stored in the "My Documents" folder, they will not touch it.

For me, this is a big letdown. I had installed thousands of dollars worth of pro audio software (halion, komplete, nexus, sample tank, fl studio, etc) which amount to 100s of gigabytes in size and sometimes requires licensing attached to the machine (via machine and OS specific IDs), so not only will I have the fun (not) and time consuming task of re-installing things, I will also have to contact the vendors to re-license to the new machine IDs. I estimate this will take me several weeks as I do not have full time to devote to this.

Also because the machine was relatively new I had not yet gotten to backing it up properly so some songs I made on it will likely be lost forever.

I am disappointed that HP could not turn around the repair in a more timely fashion. Considering I have to re-install everything again and assuming I get this back when they said I will, I will have wasted about 2 months of time to own this laptop.

No one from HP has made any form of retribution either. A free goodie or an amazon gift credit would go far in making me feel like they are sorry for the troubles.

This laptop is listed as having a 2.4/1.5 GHz quad-core processor, and it seems Amazon and many other retailers/customers are confused as to what this actually means. After scouring the Internet, I have verified that two of the four cores are "Turbo Cores" which increases their speed to 2.4 GHz each. I'm not sure whether this is overclocking or innate, however. The remaining two cores will remain at 1.5 GHz. For me, this was perfect, because most programs only make use of two cores at a time anyway.

I have only had this laptop for less then 2 week screen is going out i called HP customer service they say my Warranty did not cover this ? Like really i haven't even had it 2 weeks now this problem come up and they wont fix it wow is all i can say . this was my first HP laptop and i will never buy an HP any thing ever again .. I would not Recommend this to any one or any other HP product ....

I've been following laptop builds and brands for years now and just never found a laptop that I thought was worth it, until now. Before I even ran the dv7 I upgraded to 8GB ram ($30) and 80GB Intel SSD ($80 after rebate). So easy to upgrade btw, just pop off the back panel, no screws required. And I still have the 2nd HDD bay to place the Hp HDD in.

My updated Windows Experience Index is:
6.6 / 7.3 / 6.4 / 6.4 / 7.5

Also if you've read obi wans review below, please don't listen to him and update your drivers first!!! You will see a significant improvement and will most likely be able to run most games on high settings. So far I've only tested swtor and I can confirm that there is no lag at all even in warzones. fps hangs around 30 on high settings.

Battery life seems to be excellent, and of course won't be 10 hours if you're gaming.

EDIT FOR ADDITIONAL DETAILS
Additional purchases:
Logitech Wireless Marathon Mouse M705 With 3-year Battery Life (910-001935)
Case Logic VNC-218 18-Inch Laptop Case (Black)
Cooler Master Notepal U2 Notebook Cooler with Two Fans R9-NBC-8PBK-GP

I'm satisfied with all of these products and the way they all fit into the case.

This computer is just simply awesome. Don't let the advertized cpu speeds fool you. This computer is fast and can handle any chore I've thrown at it with ease, whether gaming or office tasks, ripping music, converting video or streaming high def video, it's all done with ease. High def video looks amazing on the monitor as well. The best part it does all this and stays cool. I have never had a computer, laptop or desktop stay as cool as this computer. Great computer

Bought this laptop in sept. Good computer especially for multi-tasking involved with all of todays software. Price was right, somewhat disappointed as dvd.cd was not multi/lightscribe as was described at the time on HP's website (HP's support and webstite has declined over the years). AMD processor pretty fast.
I would buy again for the price at the time.

There is a lot to like about this computer. However, one serious problem can ruin the product.

I bought this computer for gaming and for schoolwork. After about 5 months after purchase, the fan noise became excessively loud. The problem was intermittent. I followed the directions on HP's web site and cleaned the air intake, which temporarily fixed the issue. It is now 8 months after purchase, and the excessive fan noise is now continual; it is so loud that the box cannot be used. Browsing the internet for solutions has simply exposed a large number of people with the same problem, and no solution from HP. I've read so many complaints about low HP quality that I've concluded that it is not worth my time to try to keep this laptop. Like many other users, I plan to buy another laptop from a different manufacturer, and will never buy HP again.