Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Size does mean everything, December 26, 2008
After using this laptop for over two months I am very impressed. There are a few drawbacks to be warned about though. Below is a breakdown of the positive/negatives I have found:
POSITIVES:
(1) Beautiful large 18 inch HD screen.
Graphic display is far better than I orginally thought. The display resolution is remarkable. It can be seen best by playing a BluRay movie (Recommend Iron Man and/or Dark Knight).
(2) BluRay player
See above
(3) Remote Control is very savvy.
Included can be used for multiple types of media (playing dvd's, scrolling through music & photos, etc.)
(4) Media card read that can recognize SD, XD, MMC & MS.
Comes in handy when you want to download pictures from a camera card, etc
(5) Look & feel of the case.
HP has used a great design and color scheme on this laptop
(6) Fingerprint Security reader signon.
Has an integrated fingerprint scan on the keyboard to validate the user before they are able to signon and use the laptop.
NEGATIVES (Have found only a couple so far but....)
(1) Hard to find a bag that it will fit in.
Everyone that sells this laptop, stipulates that it will fit in "any" 17" inch bag. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Be cautious when buying a bag. The actual length of this laptop is 17.25" inches. The majority of bags are made to fit no larger than 17.0" inches in length.
After searching I did find one bag I highly recommend. If looking check out the Case Logic 17" Classic Laptop Case. It securely fits a 18' inch laptop safely & securely.
(2)BluRay Player only played pre-2008 BluRay discs when first purchased.
You may need to download the latest HP Mediasmart software, as I did to play all BluRay discs (Read Below for additional info).
In short, this is a very well made laptop, and I highly recommend.
I would like to also point out, my last four laptops have been HP's. I have found there customer service & support to be above and beyond all others.
A perfect example of this occurred when I purchased this HDX18 laptop. The third night I had the laptop, I attempted to play a BluRay movie (Iron Man). When I inserted the movie into the drive, it attempted to read it for over a minute without success. I tried a few more times, with the same results.
So I went HP's website to chat with HP tech support (FYI.. very useful feature if you hate phone support as I do). After 15 minutes there support was able to let me know that my laptop had only been on the market for a little over a month, and that since the release BluRay had updated it's copyright security.
With this said, it took HP about two weeks, but they now have a newer version of software to resolve this problem. Although it was frustrating when I first found this problem, I was very relieved once I told by HP this was a known problem and it would be fixed shortly.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impressive Machine, December 18, 2008
Purchased and shipped from Amazon. Apparently is has also been sourced elsewhere. As per someone else's review, when part of the initial personalization had a pulsing logo in the center, I was mesmerized. The screen is very, very impressive, and Internet photos on HP's AOL portal were magnificent.
It's big. Even the power supply/brick and power plug into the computer are over-sized.
I bought it because I wanted to be "wowed" -- I have aging HP laptops over 3 or 4 years old. (I bought them reconditioned direct from HP, because of presentation work a primary driver was name brand and a dedicated video card.) I returned a 17" lesser HP to Staples unopened as I justified the price increase on this model with more drive space, the subwoofers, and of course, a true HD screen which provides great real estate. It may prove to be useful in occasional presentation work as the world goes HD. I also have written music as a hobby using Reason software, and this has plenty of screen space, power, and hard drive space for 50-100GB of samples and music files and won't even sneeze. I don't have Adobe CS4 for Windows, but do own a Photoshop CS3, and again, the screen size on contemporary menu and tabbed software will be great.
Strange but true, my desktop is an aging G5 Mac (!) and this ALMOST makes me want to switch over to Wintel as my primary platform. I described this beauty as a "foldable desktop machine" to an associate. Time will tell as eventually I'll face the decision of a potentially serious change to an Intel Mac or see how well I adapt to this. (I gotta say though, those huge IMacs at Best Buy look incredible, but I'm spent out for a while.)
A few comments/constructive remarks: A backlight keyboard would be great. The way my office is lit, and I sometimes do presentation work in dark areas.. the keys are hard to distinguish and must be viewed dead on. I'd even pay a small premium for such.
Vista crashed the very first time during its boot up after going through the set up screens. A bit disconcerting, and I don't know whether it was Vista, or the machine. I've had one other freeze while at the log in/swipe fingerprint screen. I thought the latter a gimmick, but it is seductive in its own biometric way.
If you provide two headphone jacks, why not two earplugs? Literature somewhere may have described it as a Lightscribe machine, but it doesn't appear to be. Not that I really care about that or the media control, but we'll see in time about the latter.
Also, very alarming, was that my C drive showed up as 50 GB or so. This caused some worry. Fortunately, a good/lucky search term search of HP's site had a bug fix. Maybe it was due to downloading Vista SP1. The odd thing is, the bug fix worked automatically and not like the HP page described. All you had to do was launch it, and it did its job. You didn't have to type in parameters, etc.
I haven't tried the wireless yet, and don't have need that I know of for the Bluetooth, but it automatically linked up to my wired and wireless home office network. As someone else may have said, there wasn't too much junk to uninstall. I went with Kaspersky instead of the trial Norton, and loaded a new version of Home Office. I haven't had a chance yet to really push the graphics card or see how it responds with some of the 4 GB Ram assigned on top of the 512 dedicated. Time will be the shakedown.
Lastly, Amazon.com listed a rebate, but it had to be scrounged up on the HP website and wasn't a simple elegant link or form. That could easily have been improved.
That being said....Worth every penny. A steal. If you are on the edge deciding, it is really worth it and is a bargain in some ways. The value versus Mac laptops is outrageous.. this from a guy who really does need to use a true blue PC from time to time, not a Mac running Windows. I'm far from the typical user, but I love this machine.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What a Screen!, December 9, 2008
I just received this laptop yesterday, purchased on Amazon.com (sold by J&R). The delivery speed was top notch and now on to the laptop:
The size is very big yet thin and sleek but you definately don't realize how big it really is until you see it right in front of you. Set up was a breeze (~20 minutes) to get everything up and running. A great thing about this laptop is that it didn't have much pre loaded crapware to bog down the computer which was great.
The screen real estate is huge and it is beautiful. When the screen saver first came on (Windows Energy) I probably sat and stared at it for a good 10 minutes before I realized I wasn't doing anything.
The laptop also came with a nice remote control to handle all your media center needs and even slides into the laptop itself so you'll (hopefully) never lose it.
The hard drive is great but is partitioned into 2 drives which I don't really like but is a minor gripe.
The heft of the laptop is not as bad as I thought considering the size of the laptop.
I haven't checked out a blu-ray movie yet, (waiting for Dark Knight to come to my apt) so will post a revision once I see it.
The only con I have with the laptop is the mouse pad. It's not the typical mouse pad in that it feels like glass so your finger gains friction with the pad and doesn't glide as easily it does on other mouse pads. This is slightly frustrating but is probably something you will get used to after extended use.
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