The HP Pavilion DV3-1075US: Uncompromising Value

While the computer industry has been busy about the netbook phenomenon, vendors of full features laptops have been enforced to make deep price cuts on pretty capable machines to clear inventory and redeem lost manufacturing costs. One example of this sort of behavior is from HP, which presents us with the DV3-1075US in their value niche. When it came out, it was geared as a not-quite ultraportable with a compact, if not stunning, multimedia focus. Fast forward by nine months to the present, and it's still a capable machine, but briskly moving down the price ladder, as netbooks eat the bottom of the market. the HP Pavilion DV3-1075US


Competent of playing 720P movies on its 13.3" widescreen display (identical to the one on the Macbook Air), the DV3-1075US comes with AMD's dual core Turion processor in 2.1 GHZ. As an added bonus, it comes with 4 gigs of RAM standard, and Windows Vista - and it's got the muscle and RAM to handle them both perfectly. Not to be left out on the gaming side, the video card is an ATI Radeon 3200 with 64 megs of RAM, this isn't as good as you'll find on a desktop gaming rig, but for a portable machine (exceptionally with the ability to overflow into system RAM), it's more than adequate, unless you're trying to play Crysis.

The hard drive is a reasonably standard SATA connector running at 5400 RPM, holding 320 gigs. We're probably seeing the last generation of laptops with spinning hard drives right now, and we strongly recommend spending the extra for the solid state drive, specifically if you're handing the machine to a teenager or college student. Speaking of ports, it comes with the usual array of threeUSB ports and a VGA out port for driving a separate monitor. Its inherent display is 13.3" WXGA LCD with 1280x800 resolution, and good color matching. We found the viewing angle more than adequate. Overall, this is a good laptop for a college student, or high school student. It can do everything they need a laptop for, will give lots of improvement room over the next few years, and is extremely discounted in the stores right now. Excellent value for the features specified. the HP Pavilion DV3-1075US