HP Pavilion G7-2220us 17.3-Inch Laptop (Black)

I've been pretty happy with this laptop so far.

Physical appearance: It's a bit large and on the heavy side for a laptop, but it's a 17. 3" so that's to be expected. The design is very good and I was very happy that all of the obnoxious "Look at my awesome hardware!" NASCAR-style stickers were easily removed to make a more sleek appearance (save the HP logo on the back of the screen). It's a lot thinner than I expected, but again, this is not a Macbook Air. Only about an inch and a half thick means it should be an easy fit in most cases or bags compared to other models.

Performance: The first thing you have to realize is that this is not a gaming laptop. I'm not a big PC gamer, but the video card on this specific model is very good but uses onboard memory, so it's not going to give you the same performance. It did outrank my custom-built desktop with a 2gig video card with dedicated memory in the Windows Experience score though, so it might be better than my guess. I've only used this for casual web browsing, video watching, and typical business tasks (Word, Powerpoint, etc. ) and it's performed great with no lag. It even handled a visit to TVTropes (which means I had about 20 or 30 Firefox tabs open at once) without any significant performance degradation. If the 4GB of RAM isn't enough for you, though, be glad to know that the installed memory is a single chip, so you can easily buy a second stick to install. It can be a pain to find out exactly what memory to get, so I'll save you some time: DDR3-1600MHz PC3-12800. Only place I was able to find that was on page 20-something of the 107 page Maintenance and Service Guide, buried in a list of product codes for replacement parts for various bits and bobs like the CMOS battery.

Video: The screen looks great. It's got a good resolution for the size and videos look great on it. The screen's so big, though, that you might have problems getting the viewing angle right, causing the lower half of the screen to be too bright or the top half too dark. Best solution? Set the computer on the table when you're watching a movie, since you'll be far away anyway.

Battery Life: I'm going to be honest here, the battery life kind of sucks. Thankfully, the charging cable is small and light, so you don't have the massive brick you get with companies like Dell if you want to take it on a trip. I'm sure there's things I can do to extend the life, but it tends to get dangerously low on me after only 2 hours of constant use. Considering Amazon rates the battery life at 3. 5 hours, this is about what I expected.

Keyboard and Touchpad: It's been a while since I've used a laptop, so this is taking some getting used to. I really like the touchpad. It's textured rather than smooth, so it's easy to figure out where it is without looking, and it gives you a textile indicator of how you're moving the cursor.

Review about HP Pavilion G7-2220us 17.3-Inch Laptop (Black)

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Features:

• AMD A-Series Dual-Core A6-4400M 2.7 GHz (1 MB Cache)
• 4 GB DDR3
• 500 GB 5400 rpm Hard Drive, 0 GB Solid-State Drive
• 17.3-Inch Screen, AMD Radeon HD 7520G
• Windows 8

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