HP Pavilion dv9913cl user review

Specs from HP website

Spec summary:
Turion X2 TL-62
4GB DDR2 RAM
17.0" diagonal WXGA+ High-Definition BrightView Widescreen Display (1440 x 900)
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M
Windows Vista® Home Premium 64-bit with Service Pack 1

This is my third laptop computer (ok, fourth if you count a green screen 8086 unit I had in high school - it did use neat 2.5" floppies, yes 2.5" - ah, memories, but I digress) and my second HP. I aim for 3 - 5 year lifetime from my laptops. I have only had this laptop for a couple weeks, so I will update this review as I gain experience with the unit.

HP claims that up to 1 Gb RAM may be allocated to video, but in the BIOS the only choices for dedicated video RAM are 32, 64 or 128 Mb. The default was 64 Mb. Using this and either the stock or the most recent HP video drivers Civ4: BtS ran unacceptably slow - and I am not a fps freak either. After changing dedicated video RAM to 128 Mb and installing the 177.89 nVidia driver using the modded inf file from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ got Civ4: BtS going at an acceptable rate. I made these two changes all at once, so I do not know if only one of them made the most difference.

Another thing that I do not like is that the right shift key is small. I've hit enter instead of shift quite a few times now. A big part of this is that I am not a touch typer and use the right shift key far more than the left shift key - on my desktop keyboard I find it sort of with peripheral vision as the "bottom big key". Looking hard at the keyboard yields no easy solution to this as a design problem - all of the ideas I can come up with would hinder the touch typers.

I disabled the quickkeys from within Windows, as when playing games I found myself sometimes resting my non-mouse hand near the speakers and would accidentally launch some sort of multi-media preview thing that was not intuitively obvious how to return to Windows from.

I do like that the machine has a number-pad.

Well, it is bedtime for me, so I will need to come back and add some to this review later. I'll try to address comments and questions, but I am new to this forum and there might be some delay for my replies.

 

I bought the exact same system 2 weeks ago myself. It's been an awesome system. I am selling my old DV9410us. This new laptop has pretty much twice the EVERYTHING as my older one. I have had all sorts of laptops. From Compaq, IBM, and now HP. My first was an HP DV4000 series I think.

I'm still learning this thing inside and out. But I will defiantly look into changing the BIOS and Nvidia driver to run more dedicated memory. The 4 gigs of ram really come in handy on Vista systems. Any less than 2 and you are running very very slowly. The one thing that gets me though, is when I restart my system, most of the time I have to reset the local connections, or auto-change the IPs because it won't connect to the internet thought broadband. A lot of the times I have to unplug my modem to reset it as well. It's like the computer is identified as a different system, by my modem, when ever it restarts. So I am stuck trouble shooting for a few minutes before I can sign on.

I think it might just be Vista though. You have any problems with the network connections?

 

Hey my name is chris and I purchased the same labtop and I was curious If you would be able to tell me how you changed the BIOS to 128?
If it includes using DOS please give me idiot proof steps please!
Thanks

 

Greetings fellow geeks. My wife got me the HP dv9913cl for Xmas and I'm still trying to get it updated and happy. My first problem is the Quickplay volume control is not working correctly. The on screen volume gadget is very slow. I've updated quickplay and it's still broke. Any ideas?

I'll checkout the video bios change noted above. Otherwise this is a decent machine from Costco.

BTW, it took hours to get this puppy completely updated out of the box.

 

Hi All,

To any of you thinking to buy an HP laptop, please read the following forum discussion in HP website :

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/psg/board/message?board.id=Hardware&message.id=1206

Around 2 years ago HP sold some notebook products with AMD processor and NVidia GPU. Everything works fine and we love it, until last December it crash: giving weird scramble line on the screen and finally crash and it can not be restarted anymore. Now its just a dead laptop.

The problem was experience by so many, may be thousands, of owners and HP didn't try to solve the problem. The customers service have been contacted and they just goes around the bush as if trying to guide you to perform repair, but eventually they will ask you to send the notebook to their service center, and of course we need to pay a lot of money for it.

The problem was caused by NVidia GPU chip's thermal problem that make the chip overheated and finally fail to operate. The problem was already acknoledge by NVidia



http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1215037160521.html

Overall, the main problem is:

1. HP did not response this problem in the right way and did not put their frustrated customer in their priority to solve the problem (loss of money, time, and works)

2. It is indeed not happen in all models, however, it is possible to happen in anyone / any model. Once something serious like this happen ... they just washed their hand away.

Sorry if this sound uncomfortable, however, I am just so disappointed on how they treat their customer. Just imagine ... YOU BUY A NOTEBOOK TO BE USED JUST FOR 1 YEAR ... THEN IT WILL DIE.

thanks.