HP Pavilion g7-2238nr 17.3-Inch Laptop Review

List Price: $599.99
Price: $439.99

Product Features
AMD A-Series Dual-Core A6-4400M 2.7 GHz (1 MB Cache)
4 GB DDR3
500 GB 5400 rpm Hard Drive
17.3-Inch Screen
Windows 8, 3.15-hour battery life

Other Opinion

By David Valdez "David V" (Dumfries, VA)

Another Black Friday buyer here, first let me say what a great job Amazon customer support was when I had a small issue with billing and this order, top notch as always.

Anyways...

So I've owned the laptop for about 2 weeks now, the latter of which I've spent a considerable amount of time tinkering with various everyday tasks.

Let me begin with the OS, Windows 8 and it's relationship to the computer...

While I won't go into a personal review of the new Windows experience, which for the record I do mostly approve of, I will say this laptop does NOT have a Touch Screen, so you will be navigating with your track pad(more to come on that) or your mouse. Anyone who has used Windows 8 understands most of the new fancy changes were created with the idea of tablets in mind. By that I mean to say that getting around would be considerably easier with touch controls. That's not to say it isn't completely and totally usable with your mouse, just that technically it would be easier with touch. Personally I understood this going in, and it was a conscience choice not to get a touch screen as I'm not too keen on finger print smudges on what is replacing my primary machine. As a suggestion for someone looking for touch screen laptops, I would really look into one of the new flip style notebooks/ultrabooks, such as the lenovo yoga 13, where the computer pretty much converts to a tablet. One last thing I'll mention about the OS is the boot time is super fast (it doesn't actually shut down, but go to a kind of hibernate) Unless I have to restart I can be up and running in about or less than 20 seconds. For a fuller look into the actual pro's and con's of Windows 8 vs Windows 7 I'd check out engadget or cnet for in depth opinions.

*edit I should mention there is a fair amount of bloatware (software pre installed by the manufacturer) which is completely unnecessary (norton who?) but it is easy enough to uninstall, though time consuming that it is.

Next, the physical design/features...

By far the best thing the g7 has going for it is the beautiful screen and resolution. A beefy 17.3" and 1600 x 900 are nothing to scoff at when most budget laptops in this price range stick to the safe 1366x768 and 15ish". Again I say, it's simply perfect to sit down and enjoy family pictures, HD movies/tv, video games(more later), the real estate available also makes multi tasking with multiple programs open in the same screen completely doable without making sacrifices to what you see.

To go along with the screen the speakers are quite good as well, not blow you out of the water great, but I've heard a number of notebook speakers and these are certainly above better than average. Admittedly I am no audiophile, but I clearly hear the boom of a bassy explosion or the high's through pandora radio. Even with the lid closed, I can fill the room with music playing for a gathering.

The outer and inner shell are a glossy reflective black, which to some may be an inconvenience which could be a smudgy nightmare, it doesn't irk me much however, after a week of heavy use I haven't been bothered in the slight by it.

The keyboard is spacious with firm keys, layed out in a familiar manner with some usefull hoteys built into the "f" keys such as brightness, volume, play/pause. As far as keyboards I enjoy using this one, the keys have just the right amount of push to them and they are well spaced out.

Connections wise there is something to be desired, no bluetooth (get a bluetooth dongle for cheap) is a bit of a hit, but once more for the price I think I'll live. HDMI is on the left side and easy to get to, perfect for plugging into your TV or A/V receiver. The power connection is on the right back, with the actual plug being a straight long type, so you will need at least a couple inches on your right side if your sitting this on a desk. The cable and power brick also are acceptable lengths with a velcro strap and small clip for cable management.

The touch pad. So far my only real gripe with this machine is the touchpad. I'm not sure if it's a matter of software(synaptics) or RAM or I just don't know yet, but this pad has some issues. It is multi touch capable but the multi part simply does not work 100% of the time. No issues with simple one finger point and click(or tap) but when using gestures such as two finger scroll, two fingers anywhere can scroll horizontal or vertical, it will lock up and not be responsive for up to 2-3 seconds sometimes. There is a pinch to zoom which I inadvertently activate once in a while as I'm doing the two finger scroll as well. Two finger tap acts as a right click, unfortunately this has the same frequency of fail rate with the two finger slide, slightly less maybe but noticeable still. Obviously there is a problem with accuracy with multi touch, and I'm looking for a solution but for now there you go. I know it can be done right, I've used more than one mac with the multi gesture track pads and those have all worked perfect for me so we'll see, hopefully you can get some better software to fix it. The physical buttons, left and right click, work well enough, just as you'd expect, and a firm press and click.

Games...

I'm somewhat of a gamer, so of course I was extremely curious to what I could throw at this machine. It does has a dedicated card, AMD Radeon HD 7520G, it won't win any prize fights, but certainly should pull in some good bouts.

I loaded Diablo 3 and surprisingly it ran fairly well, with settings like textures at the highest but a few reductions in physics and lighting the game runs in full screen 1600x900 at about 20 fps average, and looks quite good doing so. You can lower some settings to improve your frame rate, but it's more than playable.

Starcraft 2 wasn't as successful, I can run it at high settings(ultra being higher) at about 20 fps as well, but that game will slow down as more units appear onscreen and the game progresses, and there can be a fair amount of things happening later in games, so you will likely have to turn down your graphic fidelity to get it playable.

Portal 2 looks fantastic and runs at the highest settings with a fluid gameplay, sorry I didn't get the fps for this one but it's smooth and fast as far as I can tell.

Less graphically intensive games such as Torchlight 2, Super Meat Boy, The Walking Dead all look perfect and run great. I did try the X-Com Enemy Unknown demo, but it didn't run quite well enough to try and get it working better.

I'll likely update this at a future date when I've tried some other games and report how they ran.

*Conclusion*

I feel as if I've been rambling for a while now and I may have lost some of my original thoughts but I'll summarize here real quick.

Biggest PROS~
Screen size and resolution 17.3" and 1600x900 pixels are above and beyond the call of duty for this price (currently $500 on amazon) Even better when I payed $420 on black friday week. Looks beautiful and crisp
Keyboard is spacious and quite comfortable
Battery Life( I think I forgot to mention this above) Listed as 3 hours, easily that running HD video and multi tasking in the background, more than enough for my needs
Plays recent video games, such as diablo 3, great and more than capable of less graphically intensive games such as torchlight 2

Biggest CONS~
TouchPad multi-touch simply doesn't work 100% of time. Could be software, will hopefully find a solution
No bluetooth, I can live with this however remembering the price, and you can find a good cheap dongle you can plug into one of your 3 USB's
(Not a huge CON, but the hardrive could be bigger, 500GB can fill up quite quickly these days)
Bloatware, but this almost doesn't count since everything comes with bloatware now, just find and delete it if you know what your're doing.

In my opinion, worth the buy alone for the screen size and resolution.
Hope this helps someone.