HP Pavilion DV3-1075US: mobile entertainment at its best
The HP Pavilion DV3-1075US Laptop is essentially a portable home entertainment system. Almost every aspect of its design seems to be geared towards flawless execution of entertainment media: movies, music, and games.
Fortunately, the powerful hardware needed to play HD movies and run the latest games means the HP Pavilion DV3-1075US also packs enough power for graphics, audio and video editing, and just about any office software you can think of.
The machine has a set of dual-core AMD Turion CPUs, running at 2.1GHz, and comes standard with four gigs of RAM, upgradeable to eight gigs if needed. The hard drive is a fairly standard 320 gig SATA 5400 RPG drive, and it has a dual layer DVD burner.
This laptop has many features that are clearly designed for movies and games. The video card is an ATI Radeon HD 3200 with 64 MB of dedicated DDR2 RAM, but it can be assigned system RAM by the operating system for a total of almost 2 GB of RAM.
The 13.3-inch HD display supports a resolution of 1280×800 pixels, the widescreen film format. Finally, it comes with a playback remote, conveniently stored in an Express Card slot when not in use.
The HP Pavilion DV3-1075US is also designed for cyber-age digital communications. It comes with a built-in webcam and omnidirectional microphone for video chatting and supports fast data transfer. It contains a built-in 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet port, and the wireless card supports the faster 802.11g and 802.11n standards, as well as the slower legacy 802.11a.
However, there is one chink in the armor of the HP Pavilion DV3-1075US and that is the touchpad. It seems to have a mind of its own, but only because of the touchpad’s multi-touch controllers. On its own, the touchpad also has a nice feel.
Our overall assessment is that this is a good value for money machine on the market. It’s quite capable and more than reasonably priced for what you get. It’s not going to surprise anyone, but it’s a good, solid machine that’s more than capable of meeting the needs of everyday use, at a great price.
