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So I was shopping for a laptop. I came across a nice gateway 15.4" at bestbuy for around $800. I bought it, took it home, and set it up. Performance was mortifying, something had to be wrong. I took it back and exchanged it for an HP tx1308nr 12.1" tablet pc. Lesser specs in near all aspects, yet it seemed to out perform the gateway which I had previously purchased and returned.

Configuration:

• AMD Turion 64 1.9ghz Dual Core Processor
• 1gb DDR2 5300 ram
• 160gb 5400rpm Sata Hard Drive
• nVidia Geforce Go 6150 IGP with up to 559mb shared video ram
• 12.1" Touch screen display
• DVD-RW with Lightscribe Technology
• Microsoft Vista Home Premium 32-bit
  

Well, the first thing I did was insert my Vista Ultimate x64 DVD and upgrade. It was my first experience installing Windows Vista. The installation process went rather smoothly. Why all these 64bit notebooks come with a 32bit operating system is completely beyond me. After the installation I went to HP's website and downloaded all the vista 64-bit drivers. They installed rather smoothly.

Then, I started up windows update. As an integrated feature of Windows Vista, it should perform quite well, I thought... Guess again. It took over 5 hours to install 80 updates, 43 of which failed, and the download for them was only about 15mb, which took all of a few minutes. Quite a painful process of running the update multiple times to get the updates which I needed.

The only driver which I've failed to obtain for the laptop is for the co-processor. Strange, because in the task manager, both processors are there. Performance is also going quite well, so I am not to worried about it.

I also removed the two 512mb memory chips in favor of two 1gb memory chips of the same speed. Thinking back, I probably should have done this prior to the installation of Windows Vista Ultimate x64, as it would have surely sped up the install process. Regardless, 1gb of memory ran vista pretty nicely on this laptop.

The Windows Vista Experience on the HP tx1308nr is at 3.0, respectable for any laptop I think. Initially I thought the experience was rated on some complex algorithm calculated by Windows Vista, but have since learned that it is only the lowest number of the 5 categories that are measured. Here are the ratings:

• Processor: 4.8
• Memory: 5.3
• Graphics: 3.0
• Gaming Graphics: 3.0
• Primary Hard Disk: 4.8

As you can see, the Geforce Go 6150 is the main bottle-neck of the laptop. I was a bit worried initially with it being integrated and using shared memory. However, I've downloaded an add-on for Windows Vista Ultimate called Dreamscene. What it does is animates your desktop to display a video for the wallpaper. There are quite a few out there already, so I set out to test this out.

First, however, I decided that I wanted to enable Vista Aero. Going into the desktop wallpaper and appearnce setting, I discovered that it was already enabled. Perfect, on to Dreamscene. I downloaded a couple .dream files, which use a free download from WinCustomize.com to enable reactive Dreamscene's, versus the standard video files which microsoft allows you to set. The hardware graphics acceleration of Windows Vista I think is what really made this possible. Without much taxing on the processor or video card, I was able to make a full screen HD swirly thing appear on my desktop. It kind of looked like a screen saver, only it appeared on my desktop instead of after a few minutes of idling.

With that all enabled, I decided to really put the system to the test. I downloaded the Final Fantasy XI benchmark 3, which would tell me if I was able to play Final Fantasy XI on my laptop. Granted, the game is five years old, however it's managed to stay current with most aspects of computing. The game, on my Athlon 64 5600+ 2.8ghz dual core takes up about 25% of my processing power, two copies is around 50%. Also, it will tax my 8800gts 320mb pretty well as well.

So the download is complete, and the software installed. I launched it, set it on HD graphics, and let it fly. Suddenly there are dozens of little characters running around my screen and doing different emotes to one another. It really got choppy in some instances, and I thought "oh no...". However, when the test completed, I found that my score had reached 3392. Checking what that actually meant, It seems they classify my laptop as "Very Tough" on their rating system. That is the equivalent of 6 out of 8, with 1 being the worst, and 8 being the best. Fairly respectable in my opinion. Actually playing the game after install, with higher graphics settings, with Aero and glass enabled, I was receiving 28-30fps, and the game is hard capped at 30fps, so I would say it's highly playable on this system.

The display, a mere 12.1", at 1280x800 screen resolution, is quite impressive. As a touch screen I wasn't expecting it to be of the best quality. However, aside from it being slightly more reflective than other display's I've used, it is very bright, sharp, and crisp. I didn't buy the laptop for it's touch-screen capabilities, however I do find myself using them from time to time, as an alternative to the touch pad. I prefer a mouse, but that's not available, particularly in this case. So I sit around poking my screen with my finger to click links, browse web, etc.

The touchpad... deserves a paragraph of it's own. Instead of the normal recessed smooth pad, it has a dimpled touch pad which is level with the rest of the area, not recessed. Quite honestly, I like it. It's smooth, and your finger glides nicely across it. The recessed pads I've never been a fan of, as my finger would sometimes jump across it if it was humid out, making tracking difficult. Also, recessed track pads are great at gathering dirt in the corners, and you can't utilize the entire pad because of the ledges. By far, this laptop has the best track pad I've ever used.

DVD-RW with Lightscribe Technology, ok, I can burn DVD-R and DVD+R, that's neat. But Lightscribe? I didn't know what this was, figuring it was some sort of buffer under-run protection, so I looked it up. Apparently, you can flip the disc over, and burn an image onto the top surface of it, to identify what it is. Talk about the ultimate labeling system! I am going to be buying a couple Lightscribe compatible discs shortly to try it out. The bummer: You need special discs to utilize this feature.

The web cam, which is integrated at the top of the display, captures video at a good rate. The quality is nice, and it auto-adjusts for lighting quite well as well. HP includes software to use it and capture video, and it's relatively simple to use, but I prefer to use it for video chat via Skype, AIM, or Yahoo Messanger. 

The speakers are Altec Lansing, and sound great. Granted, no sub-woofer, but it hits a good audible range. I must say, I like it. They don't get as loud as I'd like, but they are laptop speakers, and as far as laptop speakers go, I'd say they're superior to virtually every other set I've heard to date.

The wireless networking in the model I purchased is 802.11b/g. Unfortunantly at the time of purchase, the 802.11a/b/g/n(draft) plus Bluetooth 2.1 was not available, else I would have purchased that, because I really wanted to give a go at bluetooth with my printer and a set of bluetooth headphones. I'm looking at replacing the network card with the upgraded one, however I'm told that there is a difference in motherboards that allows the bluetooth feature to work, so it will not work on mine. I'm still looking into that, and have not thus far ruled out the possability. I can purchase the wireless card itself for $104 from HP directly.

The laptop comes with a 4-cell battery which protrudes a bit from the back. I don't mind the protrusion though, it's only about 1". Battery life is fantastic on this thing. With 802.11g connected to my home network, I was able to stream video for about 2.5hr from my home server on high performance battery settings, with the brightness of the monitor turned all the way up. Both brightness and wireless networking are laptop batteries worst enemy's, as well as intense graphics, so to get 2.5hr out of this, I was impressed. 

Over-all look and feel - This laptop is nice. It's quite fast, and actually feels fast. The screen is clear and bright. The keyboard is not miniaturized and feels good, and the track pad, quite nice as well. The headphone plugs are on the front, kinda annoying, but to make up for it, it has two headphone ports. Over-all I'd give the notebook a 9/10, only because it lacks the 802.11n as well as bluetooth, and comes with only 1gb of memory. With a memory upgrade, and if I find I can install the other network card to enhance my networking capabilities, I'd rate it at 10/10.

 

Thanks for reading my review, hopefully this provided some useful insight regarding this product.
 

Good lord you went into depth!  Interesting read, though.  I've always built my own desktops and refused to get a laptop, but I have found myself reconsidering recently because of the portability and being able to take it with me to class.  Will definitely keep this in mind.  Thanks!

• nVidia Geforce Go 6150 IGP with up to 559mb shared video ram
• 1gb DDR2 5300 ram

I saw the problem right there

mrbiggums:

• nVidia Geforce Go 6150 IGP with up to 559mb shared video ram
• 1gb DDR2 5300 ram

I saw the problem right there

For $60 I purchased 2x1gb chips and put them in the laptop, putting it at 2gb. However, the laptop ran fine with 1gb. I do heavy database management and wanted this laptop to be able to do so as well, which was the reason for 2gb. If that wasn't the case, 1gb would have been fine.

Your comment regarding the video card, it is a laptop. It's not a gaming machine. The two are not synonymous. It does, however, play Final Fantasy XI on max graphics giving me a steady 30fps, which is the frame cap for that game. People cutting down laptops because they don't have "Dual 8800GTX 768mb" video cards is absurd. Do you have any idea what that does to battery life? What's the point of a laptop if you cannot go portable?

Under the basic power consumption profile, I was able to get 4 hours of battery life from this laptop, while playing full screen video, which was highly compressed, which does take a toll on processor and ram, and thus, battery life. With minor tweeks, this laptop could see 5 hours battery life on the factory battery.

In my opinion, if you want a high end gaming machine, you can either waste $1500-$2500 on a high end laptop, or build a better desktop for $600-$700, that will be everything above and beyond the laptop you could ever want. Your super laptop will only give you 30min of battery on high performance with 17"+ LCD, dual video cards, dual hard drives, etc. Sounds pretty worthless to me.

Additionally, going in and ripping on computers because they don't meet your requirements, which would boost the cost by $500+, is completely juvenile. Get something better to do.