HP Pavilion g6x
- Category: Notebook Computers
April 19, 2011
Editor's Rating
- Inexpensive
- Stylish, portable design
- Comfortable keyboard
- Very good performance
- Uncomfortable touchpad positioning
- Lots of bloatware & trialware
- Lightweight graphics card
The HP Pavilion g6x is a sub-$600 15-inch laptop that offers a speedy Intel Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM and large 500GB hard drive. It has a sturdy, attractive design and offers really solid performance for the everyday user without having to spend a lot of money.
The design of the HP Pavilion g6x is simple, yet attractive as it sports a charcoal-gray finish, but it also comes in blue, pewter, purple and red for an extra $25 from HP.com. The lid of the laptop is shiny, but it doesn't show fingerprints as easily as we first thoughts. In total, it measures 14.7 x 9.7 x 1.4-inches and weighs just over 5-pounds, which makes it fairly compact and lightweight for the size of the display.
The keyboard is rather standard, but it does a good job because the keys are adequately sized and spaced to provide an overall comfortable typing experience. There is no dedicated number pad, as some other similar models have. The Synaptics touchpad, however, is not centered with the keyboard, but rather centered with the laptop. The surface of the touchpad is textured and offers multitouch gesture capability. At the upper left corner, there is a small dimple that allows you to turn the touchpad on/off by tapping it twice.
HP's 15.6-inch LED-backlit display offers a native resolution of 1366 x 768-pixels, which is 720p HD quality. The screen was quite bright, but the trade off was a little lacking the contrast department.
In terms of port selection, you'll find HDMI-out, VGA-out, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, headphone/microphone jacks and an SD memory card reader on the right side. The left side houses the SuperMulti optical disc drive and an additional USB 2.0 port.
The internal specifications include an Intel Core i3-380M (2.53GHz) processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM (supports 8GB maximum), a 500GB 5400RPM hard drive, Intel integrated HD graphics and a LightScribe SuperMulti DVD optical drive. There is also 802.11b/g/n wireless connectivity as well. We really liked the Intel CPU that HP choose for this system as well as the 4GB of system memory because it provided speedy performance all-around. The 500GB hard drive also provides more than enough space for the typical laptop user. HP includes Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) as the operating system.
The integrated Intel HD graphics provided good performance for the everyday computing tasks, as well as watching HD video. However for 3D gaming, it has no chance of giving even playable performance. This computer is definitely not made for gaming.
Expect to get about 4.5-5 hours of battery life with the included six-cell battery, which is about par for the course.
As with all HP computers it seems, this one comes with lots of pre-installed software, including trialware and bloatware. There are a few useful HP utilities and services, like HP CloudDrive that provides 2GB of free online data storage. However there is also a 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security 2011 and a trial of Microsoft Office 2010. Other software includes Cyberlink PowerDVD 9, HP Music Store, HP Games, Snapfish Picture and many toolbars and links for online services are also included.
