HP Pavilion DV71240US 17.0Inch Laptop

Avoid HP, worst service and warranty support in existance
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
Laptop was received with a broken ethernet port. HP would not service my laptop due to “customer related damage” which it was obviously not. There is a reason they are dead last in all customer service polls. God forbid if you need actually service. Between dealing with people in India, which most barely speak English, and zero warranty support, take your money elsewhere. HP is the worst service experience I have ever had.

my kewl DV7-1260us
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I brought my new laptop HP DV7-1260us and love it. bronze color is cool. and i love all the features. The IR remote control. Never had a remote control for a laptop before. But this is cool! The 17″ widescreen i love. but one thing i do think it needs is the keypad needs a backlight. and the webcam coulod use a green light to indicate that the camera is on or off. But other then that its one of my best choices.

The notebook I always wanted!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This notebook is amazing. It’s worth every single cent! I work with video and photo editing and I have to deal with HD files sometimes, and this computer is always perfect for the job. I have it for 3 months now and never had ANY problems with it. It didn’t even froze once! Before buying it I read some bad reviews about the keyboard, but I love that keyboard! Not sure if they changed it or if that’s the old one they were talking about, but there’s no problems with it at all! I still can’t believe I paid this price on such an amazing item like this. It was a bargain!

Feature packed and priced well below the competition.
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I will start this review by saying that my old laptop was beyond slow and well past its prime, so just about anything would have been a huge improvement. I did a fair amount of research and this laptop was by far the most feature-packed for the price. The same specs with a different brand name would have cost me $700-$900 more, easily.

The laptop is loaded with entertainment features like webcam, bluray, HDMI port, 4 USB ports, TWO headphone jacks and lightscribe! I will admit, the lightscribe was a huge plus. If you don’t know, it’s a way to laser etch artwork/words onto burned CDs/DVDs instead of using sticker labels or writing on them with permanent markers. I have no complaints with any of this stuff because these are all features I’ve not had until now and I’m just excited to have them at all. The laptop is blazingly fast compared to my old one (but that’s not saying much). It has a neat touch bar above the keyboard that lets you quickly: mute/unmute, control volume, play, pause, forward, rewind, stop, and even turn off the wifi. It’s a huge laptop, you may have a hard time finding a bag it will fit in (seriously), but it’s not an issue for me. I love having such a large screen and I don’t move the laptop around much (I would not have purchased a laptop this large for heavy travel). I also love that it has a full sized keyboard (YAY!) and a separate number keypad off to the right for super speedy number crunching! It has a cute little remote control so you can hook the laptop up to your TV and use it as a sometimes bluray/DVD player, it even stores in the side of the laptop when not in use. I also like that this machine doesn’t seem to get hot at all…my old laptop you could fry eggs on that thing for how hot it ran!

The not so great stuff:

It comes with Vista and I don’t like it, but it’s not the laptop’s fault, they all come with Vista now, don’t they.

It has a lot of bloatware (a lot of preinstalled software that you probably don’t need and just having it there takes up space and hogs memory/resources) and no easy way to remove it without doing a wipe/reinstall

…and it does not come with Vista CDs to do that which complicates things a bit.

I read a lot of reviews talking about the keys being almost unreadable, for everything else that came with this machine for this price…I was willing to paint them on myself if it was really that bad! I’m not sure if HP fixed the problem or if I’m not using the laptop in the same conditions as those with the complaints, but I can see/read them fine (I use the laptop indoors with ambient/indirect sun lighting for the most part). The keys and laptop are a metallic bronze color, so it has a bit of a mirror like finish that I could certainly do without…but it is not nearly as obnoxious/annoying/blinding as the laptops with that chrome/silver mirror finish. That’s all with the aesthetics; not the important stuff (not to me anyway).

For the price and being chock full of features, I can’t justify taking off a star for any of the very minor flaws. I’ve had this for almost a month now and I love it. I will update this review once I’ve had it longer should anything change or need mentioning.

Keyboard
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
The keyboard is unreadable (black lettering against a bronze background)

How could such an experienced firm make such a mistake!?

HP Pavilion dv1260us w/ 17″ Screen
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
I have had my HP Pavilion dv1260us for 7 months now. At first, I was totally jazzed by the unit – a great 17″ screen, which I love, along with many other great features. It was fast and worked great. But then, after 5 or 6 months of fairly heavy use, I began having problems.

Before I get into those, let me say that I took very good care of the laptop – using it only at home – not taking it anywhere or abusing it in any way. (Due to severe space constraints, I choose to use a laptop rather than a desktop computer.) Since I use an added wireless keyboard, I do not have an issue with the laptop’s keyboard as expressed in other comments.

Without going into long, tedious details, the main problems consisted of the DVD player failing. I contacted HP tech support, which I personally think is very good – I got e-mail replies within a couple of hours and they continued to try to work with me. Bottom line, I never did get the DVD player to work, which in many ways makes the computer useless as you cannot play your movies or music on disk and you cannot download the software programs that come with new hardware items such as printers, etc.

The other major thing that started to happen was the computer just began shutting down for no apparent reason. I contacted HP tech support and tried many interventions without fixing the problem. The most recent thing (disaster!) which happened was all of a sudden I got a blue screen with the dreaded message: “Fatal System Failure.” I have no formal training with computers; however, I have used them for years and have sort of learned along the way. So, I tried everything that I could think of and finally got the laptop to boot up. Everything looked okay, except as I checked things out further, I discovered that I had lost all of my files! I was so grateful that just 3 weeks before I had subscribed to a back-up service which daily scans and stores the contents of your computer, so I was able to successfully restore everything. (By the way, I highly recommend getting a reputable back-up service. It can prevent disaster!)

So, now everything is restored (at least for the moment) and I haven’t had a shut-down in a while, but the DVD unit still does not work. Plus, I have “lost faith” in the computer. With the kind of work that I do, which includes being a webmaster, I MUST have a reliable machine that I can trust.

Rather than return the computer and go thru whatever delays that may entail, I have decided to try a different brand. I had poor luck with my last HP Pavilion, so I am ready for a brand change. The other computer also had problems with the DVD unit. In my opinion, HP does not produce the high-quality computers that they used to a while back.

My very first computer many years ago was an Acer, which I had good luck with, so I have decided to go back and give that brand a re-try. I will return this HP unit for whatever repair or replacement HP may give, but I will not use it as my primary computer.

I hope this review has been useful. I think many times a review is done before the “honeymoon” for a given product is over and in my opinion many of those early reviews are skewed towards the positive. Since I have had this computer for over 6 months, I do think this review might be a bit more accurate than those done after just a few weeks or less of product use. Wishing you the best of luck with your computer search!

Great buy for the price
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I bought this for my fiancee after she went overseas primarily for Skype video chat and because she like to watch things and play games from time to time. For the most part she is very happy with it and loves it. I played with it before I sent it to her. Updated it and installed items. For the most part the computer itself performs well. I would have given it 5 stars but Vista just rubs me the wrong way.

I was jealous that it came with bluray as I have a Toshiba Qosmio and bluray has yet to be included with that model. Oh well. She definitely has an advantage with this model. I’m an IT and I was already a fan of HP so to see her smile and be excited was enough for me to be pleased with another product that they released. Definitely a great bargain.

For those parents looking for something for their college kids and still give the great power and performance then this would definitely be a great investment. Primarily because its a name you can trust.

17″ screen

plenty of memory

great processor

bluray

Just buy it!