HP Pavilion DV4-2161NR 14.1-Inch Laptop (Digital Plaid) Reviews
HP Pavilion DV4-2161NR 14.1-Inch Laptop (Digital Plaid)
- Intel Core i3-330M Processor (2.13 GHz, 3 MB L3 Cache)
- 4 GB DDR3 System Memory (2 DIMM) (expandable to 8 GB)
- 500GB (7200RPM) Hard Drive (SATA), LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD±R/RW with Double Layer Support
- Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, * Up to 4.25 Hours of Battery Life
- 14.1″ Diagonal WXGA HD HP BrightView Widescreen Display (1280 x 800), Intel HD Graphics with up to 1696MB Total Available Graphics Memory
For those who want an all-in-one performance notebook with rich multimedia features, the HP Pavilion dv4 Entertainment series delivers mobile performance that looks as great as it runs. Powered by the latest processor and graphics technologies, it delivers optimal mobile performance to support your lifestyle.
List Price: $ 970.00
Price: $ 970.00
HP Pavilion dm4-1160us 14-Inch Laptop PC – Up to 6.25 Hours of Battery Life (Argento)
- Intel Core i5-450M Processor (2.40GHz); 4GB DDR3 SDRAM memory (2 x 2GB) (expandable to 8GB); 500GB (5400 RPM) Serial ATA hard drive; Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
- 14 Inch diagonal High-Definition HP BrightView LED Display (1366 x 768), Intel HD Graphics with up to 1696MB total graphics memory, Intel Wi-Di ready to wirelessly stream your photos, videos and other PC content to an HD TV
- External Ports: 5-in-1 memory card reader; 3 USB 2.0 (3rd port shared with eSATA); 1 HDMI; 1 VGA (15-pin); 1 RJ -45 (LAN); 1 Headphone-out; 1 Microphone-in
- SuperMulti 8X DVD±R/RW with Double Layer Support; Dolby Advanced Audio with Altec Lansing speakers; Integrated 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN; Wireless LAN 802.11b/g/n WLAN & Bluetooth
- Brushed aluminum finish; 101-key compatible with island-style full-size keyboard; HP Clickpad with On/Off button; HP TrueVision Webcam with integrated digital microphone; HP SimplePass with integrated fingerprint reader
The HP Pavilion dm4 notebook gives you the performance of a powerful PC without weighing you down. Less than 1″ slim and starting at 4.4 pounds, this lightweight notebook offers the latest technology with style that’s sure to attract attention. If you need a PC that can keep up with you, grab the HP Pavilion dm4 and go.
List Price: $ 824.99
Price: $ 625.00
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6 Responses to “HP Pavilion DV4-2161NR 14.1-Inch Laptop (Digital Plaid) Reviews”
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March 26th, 2011 at 12:28 pm
HP, please do something about your batteries…,
I had have this computer for a month now, so here goes nothing:
Pros:
- Excellent design
- 4GB Ram, enough for most tasks
- 500GB hard drive, for me that’s enough for now
- Small size and little weight (even lighter when DVD is removed, which is an excellent feature in itself)
- Windows 7 (better than Vista, we’ll see about XP)
- EXCELLENT PRICE
Cons:
- Battery life is about 2 hours, bound to decrease within 6 months, not on par with most other laptops this size.
- Touchpad really has a mind of its own on ocassion.
- Glossy design is beautiful, but it’s also a fingerprint magnet
- Opening it is a cumbersome task, not really bad, but a little.
- Windows 7 “64bit” – Some old programs I use refuse to work in such environment.
All in all a solid laptop, with excellent features (and minor inconveniences), but please, HP, this is my third HP laptop and the batteries have never been your forte. (yet I keep buying HP) DO SOMETHING!
UPDATE: The battery won’t last for more than an hour and a half, so I took two stars off my review for this major inconvenience. Sorry to say this, but I no longer recommend this purchase.
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|March 26th, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Excellent Computer for an Excellent Price,
I’ve owned my computer for almost a week now, and I’m absolutely loving it. For the money I almost bought an Hp with a T6600 processor and 320GB hard drive etc etc. I bought this for the same price as the other hp and got MORE memory and a better processor. Why wouldn’t you want an upgrade of 180 GB hard drive for free? If your a student and like to have lots of music, videos and play light gaming and still have tons of room for your homework and projects, this is a great computer.
I also love how its 14″ monitor, so I can take it anywhere and fit it into any bag. It has a very sleek and glossy exterior. A little bit of work to keep clean, but that’s no reason not to buy a computer. The speakers are great for a laptop. I was actually surprised how clear sounds and music was. As with most HP laptops, you get the lightscribe burner, which is great, but it also comes with a disc replacement thing so if you don’t care to use a disc drive, you can remove it and save some weight. But really it doesn’t weigh that much.
The only downfall I have with this computer is the slightly low battery life. I think a little bit of that might be my fault cause I just plugged in and played rather than letting the battery charge fully first before I started playing with it.
Great laptop for the price.
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|March 26th, 2011 at 1:34 pm
Good system, recommended for most,
This is a good system to own if you can deal with a few minor annoyances.
Windows 7 works well. Most things are in different places than XP but it’s easy to find them.
This system has a basic graphics card. The Windows Experience numbers warn that the Aero interface will be sluggish sometimes, and I definitely feel that’s true.
The hard drive impressively large, although not all the 500GB is usable. It is split up into three partitions. One is the system restore partition (since Windows install discs are not included), and one is the quickstart partition (a fast starting non-Windows environment that lets you surf the web and browse your media collection), so the hard drive really has only around 320 mb free when you get it. That’s lots for your pictures, videos, music, etc. It’s also quite speedy.
4GB RAM standard, which should be more than enough, except that about 1.5 GB are used for the integrated graphics so you only have around 2.5 GB for programs. In the future, when RAM prices come down, I’ll be upgrading to 8GB of RAM.
The only ads on the machine are trials of Norton Internet Security 2010 1-User, and Microsoft Office Standard 2007 FULL VERSION, prominent links to HP’s accessories store (buy from Amazon instead), an ad for an online backup service, and an icon for one of Amazon’s competitors (a Bay Area auction site). Not bad.
I have no problems with overheating here. The touch panel for adjusting volume is very very useful.
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|March 26th, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Great Performance, Ultra Portable,
This laptop really lives up to its description: ultra portability without sacrificing performance. I’m posting this review after a week of ownership.
PROS: Awesome aluminum design, bright display, bluetooth, good webcam, 7200rpm HD, fast processor, runs cool, great WiFi range, good battery life, lightweight (4.41 lbs), fingerprint reader, sturdy, WiDi, HP QuickWeb
CONS: Touchpad gestures, keyboard stiffness, mediocre audio, dvd eject button
* MY PERSONAL NEEDS:
My focus while searching for a new laptop was for portable productivity including office and business applications, software development kits (I’m a programmer), and presentations. I was looking for something with decent processing power to handle multiple applications. What I was not looking for was a gaming machine. The graphics card was therefore somewhat irrelevant. This dm4-1160us by HP stood out because it offered a great processor, Bluetooth, a good webcam, and decent battery life in a light and perfectly manageable package.
* FIRST IMPRESSIONS UPON OPENING:
From the start I knew this was the laptop for me. The aluminum finish, including the design that complements it, is truly a work of art in terms of both aesthetics and practicality. Most modern laptops have a glossy finish that attract fingerprints seemingly even when you’re not touching it. This is the complete opposite offering a sleek and professional look without constantly having to wipe it down. During the first few hours of personalization I noticed no hint of heat nor slow down of any kind. It has been quick from the start. Boot up times are average, but perfectly reasonable and even quicker if you take advantage of HP’s QuickWeb feature that lets you use some common applications without booting into Windows. The screen is plenty bright and has a very nice and crisp picture. It is better than my Samsung r480 and older Toshiba Satellite, and on par with my older Core 2 Due HP model. If anything the screen on this one is just a bit less reflective than the one on my older HP, which is a good thing.
* PERFORMANCE:
This is my first experience in personally dealing with Intel’s new i3/5/7 series processors, and I have to say it exceeded my expectations. In the past couple years the only machines I built were made for gaming, and AMD processors are perfect for affordable gaming machines. While I still believe that AMD is better than Intel cost/value speaking for gaming, I always stick with Intel when building a machine for true intensive multitasking. Even with running multiple applications including some processor heavy development kits, Adobe CS, and other software simultaneously, the laptop runs without a glitch and without producing any noticeable heat nor noise. The Core i5 is definitely a step up from the Core 2 Duo series, and a significant one from the previous dual core T-series that can still be commonly found on the market today.
4GB of memory has become the standard in the laptop market, and there isn’t much to say about that other than it works. However what isn’t common is a 7200 RPM hard drive in a laptop (especially one with a good battery life). If you don’t do much in terms of file transfers you probably won’t really benefit nor notice, but it is definitely a plus for me where I’m constantly transferring files for projects back and forth.
The integrated graphics certainly isn’t a selling point, but it gets the job done unless you’re planning to use it for modern full screen gaming. It will play most games, but you’ll have to scale back the settings. If I want to play a graphics intensive game I’m going to do it on a desktop with a larger monitor anyway, so this wasn’t a selling point one way or the other. Something I found odd was that the Windows Rating System gave the graphics a higher rating for gaming than it did for Aero (desktop and productivity), but in my experience so far it has managed everything just fine including Adobe, movies, and a couple simple games that I tried out to test the display. I will say that most of the laptops I’ve owned/used have had integrated graphics, and even so this laptop still feels quite a bit quicker in all aspects. If it were compared to another version of itself with a dedicated card then you would notice a difference, but it is not underpowered by any means.
* TOUCHPAD:
Many people are commenting about how the touchpad is finicky and hard to use, especially when keeping a finger on the mouse button. I don’t personally have the same issues and am able to use the touchpad easily. In fact I purposefully attempted to duplicate the problem myself and was unable to see why there’s so much trouble over it. And I rather like the textured feel of it and prevents fingerprinting and makes it easy to keep track of. However I really don’t like the gestures. Macs do a way better job of handling the two finger slide…
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|March 26th, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Great little machine. Touchpad is great!,
I won’t bother telling you how powerful, quiet, and lightweight this machine is. People seem to just want to focus on the touchpad. Maybe early runs of it had problems, but mine works perfectly. The only quirk is that if you have two fingers on the touchpad at the same time, and try to move the mouse, you get this fricking 4-headed arrow that has crazy effects (in chrome, it increases and decreases the font size). Just make sure that one finger stays on the mouse button, and another finger can move the mouse. The problem arises because there is no tactile border between the mouse buttons and the touchpad, so if you are careless, you can end up with two fingers on the touchpad, and…..chaos. It took me about 7 minutes to figure out that if you keep your index finger on the lower half of the mouse button (which you *can* feel) then it’s easy to move the mouse with another finger and have no problems. I actually find the touchpad quite responsive.
I love this machine, and think it is a steal for not much more than $700. Maybe it’s not for everybody, but don’t let rumors of touchpad issues dissuade you.
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|March 26th, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Great laptop for school and photoediting,
(paid $700) Bought this guy about a week ago. It has excellent styling and feels very solid. The keyboard is awesome, but the touchpad can be a bit finnicky. Although it’s nothing a few days of getting used to wouldn’t fix. I use my laptop for school and Photoshop CS5. It has an awesome battery life which has already given me four and a half hours of youtube/browsing use. The battery life keeps getting better, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets close to the promised six. It stays very cool, and mostly quiet. Even when the processor kicks into high gear it is barely discernible. It feels very snappy and handles photoshop quite nicely for a laptop. For most of your editing, including assembling HDR and using photomerge it does just fine. To give you an idea, I merged 22 raw files the other day with a fairly complex background, it did it in about a minute. The sore spot is the lack of dedicated graphics. Many game’s are still playable, but you’ll have to scale back the settings. Civ V runs super smooth on low and is completely playable on medium. SC2 runs great on low. However the snappy performance in other tasks and the great battery life more then make up for the poor graphical performance.
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