Thu Aug 25, 2011 11:16 pm
Its my first experience with Windows 7. My previous laptop is a Toshiba A105-S4021 with 4GB and the same SDD running WinXP. The CPU in that was a 1.66GHz centrino. So, it was a little light in CPU power, especially when using Adobe Lightroom to look a pictures. It took 30-60 seconds to render a picture. Also, web browsing seemed to catch all the time when scrolling down a page and having to refresh.
The HP is much quicker, subjectively feels like less than 10 seconds to render a picture. Web browsing is smooth. The laptop immediately synched with my bluetooth phone. Plugging in an HDMI cable immediately worked with my TV, effortless. I watched an Amazon primetime move that way over my wireless and both sound and resolution were great. CPU usage was a few % playing video. I installed VLC and played a blu-ray music video and that sounded good and looked great.
Hmm, This is a 15.6" screen, what I do not like is the slightly less screen area compared to my Toshiba. The screen is the same length but just over an inch narrower in width. Resolution on the Toshiba was something like 1280x800. On the HP its something like 1366x768. Photographs look squished. I went back to the store and now I sort of wish I had gone for a 17.3 inch just to have the taller screen. I like the LED backlighting but my Toshiba screen has wider viewing angles and deeper blacks for astrophotography pics downloaded from Hubble. It seems like with this screen, I am constantly tilting it to try and figure out what is the straight on view. This bugs me the most, screen quality is not as good as the Toshiba.
I would have bought the Toshiba version of the Llano, but, only the HP had the A8-3500M CPU. All the Toshiba models are A6-3400M or lower. Also, only the HP had the USB3 support, which, by the way, I have not tried out yet.
I'm going to put civilization V on this and play some and I will write about that later.
CPUZ shows the cores running at 800MHz and then jumping to 2.4GHz on load but I cannot see how many cores jump up. I figured maybe a USB powered cooling fan support might let more cores stay cool but no clear way to see whats going on. I'll see if hardware monitor will run and give that a try.
X6 1100T BE | Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ | XFX HD 7870 | 16 GB DDR3 | Samsung 830/850 Pro SSD's | Logitech cherry MX-brown G710+ | Logitech G303 Daedalus Apex mouse | SeaSonic SS-660XP 80+ Pt | BenQ 24' 1900x1200 IPS | APC Back-UPS NS-1350 | Win7 Pro