Hp Dv6000t: Full Featured Multimedia Notebook

By Author: Yasin Resif
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The Pavilion dv6000t is a stylish, reasonably priced laptop for both work and play. Highlights include a bright 15.4-inch wide-screen display, a keyboard with a touchpad lock, strong sound, one-touch entertainment, and a superb optional docking station.

The dv6000t offers a wide choice of AMD and Intel processors (a t in the model name indicates Intel, while a z designates AMD). Our $1499 (as of 9/8/06) review unit came equipped with a 1.83-GHz Core 2 Duo T5600 processor and 1GB DDR2-667 SDRAM. It earned a WorldBench 5 score of 101, placing its performance among the top 20 percent of notebooks we've tested.

Whether you're a fashion aficionado or a regular sloppy Joe, there's no getting past this notebook's arresting design. In a determined effort to appeal to 'da yoof', HP has decked out its Pavilion series with a wardrobe of funky new looks. Often when a vendor attempts this feat, the results are about as cool as your granddad wearing MC Hammer pants (see the Acer for pictorial evidence). However, we have to admit that HP pulled it off this time around, as the dv6000 is one seriously sleek machine.

With ...
... its smooth sleek curvature and trippy wave in-laid pattern, the notebook's exterior certainly sets itself apart from blander rivals. It will doubtlessly look right at home tucked beneath the arm of a graphics designer or college hipster (i.e. people who effortlessly look cooler than everyone else). Beneath its lid, things are no less stylish; sporting a subtly patterned silver body complemented by an elegant black keyboard and blue LED lights. Its appearance is very much tailored for the Y generation, which has the unfortunate side-effect of making older users look a bit sad and desperate. Basically, if you're over 30 and care what people think about you, you'd do well to leave this notebook at home.

If we had to cite one problem with the dv6000's design, it would probably be the bezel that surrounds the 15.1in widescreen display -- it's so glossy that it actually affected our eyesight (then again, maybe we're older than we think). In any event, we're confident that its target audience will be more than happy with the overall aesthetic. Well done, designing chaps.

Our Pavilion DV6000z was loaded with internal components that take advantage of its external features. A 1.8GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 processor is accompanied by 1GB of DDR2 memory, a 120GB hard drive, and an nVidia GeForce Go 7200 TurboCache graphics card. This turned out to be ample power for Vista Home Premium, delivering Windows Aero glory without a hiccup. We tested out all of the new bundled apps for photo/video editing and management, and the laptop sailed through those as well, even when we ran several at the same time.

The real draw, of course, is the performance. The Core 2 Duo processor helped the dv6000t deliver the best MobileMark 2005 score we've ever seen from a mainstream portable (279)-a full 50 points better than the identical machine configured with the older Core Duo CPU. Battery life was a respectable 3 hours and 39 minutes.

Like all Pavilion laptops, the dv6000 includes a row of light-touch buttons above the keyboard that launch the media player and provide volume and playback controls. We like the sleek look of the keys, but we hate the beeping that indicates you've pressed a button; the sound can be disabled, but doing so is rather complicated. The Altec Lansing stereo speakers, located above those controls, deliver decent-quality sound, but unfortunately the sound becomes muffled if you close the laptop lid. The Pavilion dv6000's keyboard is ample and comfortable to type on for long periods, and both touch pad and mouse buttons are entirely usable. We love the Pavilion dv6000's touch pad on/off button, which keeps you from accidentally misplacing the cursor while typing and makes it easy to use an external mouse.

The dv6000 also performed reasonably well in our battery test. By looping a DVD, which uses the speakers and the optical drive for maximum drain, we managed to run down the battery in 102 minutes, a fairly good result. (Normal usage will keep the notebook going for longer.)

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