Rydertech

Hewlett-Packard knocked this one out of the park. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I was so pleased with a product, or when I could absolutely say that there wasn’t a single thing either wrong or not as good as it could have been. In fact, now that I think of it, I can remember the last time I was so impressed with a product—it was in 2007 when I got my Creative X-fi desktop sound card (spare me the “Boycott Creative!” bilge, please), and before that I have to go all the way back to 2003 when I got my Kawai ES3 music keyboard (still chugging and still a phenomenal controller board).

That having been said, perhaps you have some misgivings about the objectivity of the review to come. Rest assured, I have extremely high standards (as this blog entry about the experience of purchasing the machine should make clear) and I will leave no stone unturned in this review. I may even add to it as I think of things I forgot. And, to be honest, I’ll back off of my superlatives at the beginning: there are a few things I can criticize about my HP dv6-1355dx. And I’ll list all half dozen of them during the course of this review.

Description (Specs, Aesthetics, etc.)

Instead of separating these categories (which bleed into one another, anyway), I’ll combine them. Spec-wise, the HP isn’t an unheard-of collection. Here’s a really good run-down. The major features include an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 processor (2.2 GHz, 2 MB L2 Cache), 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 500 GB HDD (5400 RPM SATA), 15.6″ 1366 x 768 pixel LED-backlit display, Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics, three USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA/USB 2.0 port, an HDMI output, a VGA output, etc. Follow the link for a more complete picture. For the $679.99 paid at Best Buy, this is quite a machine. It represents that hallowed 85% region, where you can spend hundreds of dollars more but at most only achieve an extra 15% (except for graphics performance, which of course increases exponentially with the addition of dedicated graphics hardware).

Physical Description

Make no mistake: this thing is quite a beast. The word “portable” definitely does not come to mind with this machine, even more so than with my former behemoth, a Toshiba Satellite A105-S4014. The HP is an inch wider than the Satellite, yet in my estimation it’s slightly lighter. Either way, it’s a six pound plus machine that fits even more poorly than my old Satellite on the little strips of wood they call “desks” at Wayne State. My initial inclination was toward a 14″ or smaller machine, but I decided to go the notebook + netbook route instead, which allowed me to select a larger machine.

The HP dv6-1355dx is black with an imprinted pattern of bubbles and something that looks like cartographic lines—or else sound waves emanating from a sound source. Either way, it’s pretty subtle in medium-to-dim light, so it’s not distracting. The finish on this notebook is your typical ultra shiny plastic that collects fingerprints far too easily. Around the edge of the bottom half of the notebook is a silver plastic rim which looks pretty classy, though the seams on each side where the two halves of this meet don’t. In particular the right side is a poor match. The  main problem I can see with this design feature is that the plastic rim will eventually get gouged and pitted unless it’s really durable.

Screen, Keyboard, and Trackpad

The screen on this machine is simply gorgeous. I never put it on full brightness; it’s like staring into the sun if you do. Compared to the putrid, orangey-greenish tint and depressing dimness of my Satellite’s screen, the HP’s is like a revelation. White looks—well, white. Maybe there’s a slight bluey-periwinkle tint (on account of the LED backlight), but when referenced against itself (i.e. if it’s the only screen in the room) you won’t notice this—on the Toshiba I was never unaware that white looked hideously wrong and that the screen was dim. Colors aren’t particularly accurate—when compared to a properly-calibrated Samsung LCD HDTV (extremely highly regarded), our business website looks far too blue, and reds and greens look slightly subdued in general. However, when again compared only to itself the effect is very pleasing. When compared to my old Toshiba, the latter’s screen looked as though it had a dark, orangish filter stuck over it. This is a definite upgrade over my Satellite, and across the three makes I considered—Toshiba, Asus, and HP—the last had in my judgment the best screens.

The keyboard on the dv6-1355dx feels very nice. The keybed is very solid; flexing it is possible but difficult. Key travel doesn’t feel too springy or too mushy; it’s just about right. The tops of the keys are glossy (like the rest of the case), which might at first seem like an odd choice. Take a look at your own keyboard right now. Unless you just bought your computer, I guarantee you that your keyboard by now looks glossy. Keys wear down. Both HP and Toshiba seem to have figured out that it makes no sense to use textured keys, as they’ll just end up unevenly worn six months after they enter service and will look even worse than if they all just started out smooth.

The layout of the keys is pretty standard, and the keystrokes register easily and without fail. I haven’t found any that stick or otherwise give me trouble. These are not the “island” keys that have been gaining popularity, but the standard square kind with slightly sloped edges. The main drawback of this design is that it’s (theoretically) easier to accidentally hit keys; additionally, dirt falls through the cracks more easily and there seems to be a never-ending supply of it after a while, which resurfaces each time you close the lid and transport the device. It’s too early to tell if this will be as bad a problem as it was with the Satellite.

The F-keys have separate functions mapped to them, which are toggled via a combination of an F-key and the Function (Fn) key. These include backlight brightness, sleep and lock functions, multimedia controls, etc. There are no analog controls on this machine, which could either be good or bad (depending on if your OS has support for these functions—more on this later). These controls are very easy to use and have presented no problems to me. There are gaps between every four F-keys, and functions within these sets are logically grouped.

The trackpad feels very nice, though not quite as nice as that of my Satellite (there, you see, a criticism!) on account of the former’s somewhat slick surface. Still, control is excellent, and the actual pad real estate is a generous 4″ x 2″ (though some of this is taken up by the scroll strip on the right). The pad is slightly recessed, though not so much as that of my Satellite. Vertical scrolling works fairly well, though it seems a little more finicky than on my Satellite. The HP likes you to be right on the silk-screened line, or else you’ll find yourself sliding your finger with nary an effect.

Right and left mouse clicks are handled by the standard two separate buttons, and these feel very nice: they’re plenty large and depress with minimal pressure but deliver a solid click. They, like the touchpad itself, match the silver plastic rim of the case. In addition, for those who like to turn off the touchpad when they type (usually while using a USB mouse), there’s a button directly above the trackpad for this (located in a much more logical place than the corresponding button on my Asus Eee PC). This button is somewhat small and stiff, likely to prevent accidental depression by those who are not looking to activate this feature.

Located above the keyboard is a set of touch-sensitive controls. There’s a mute on/off toggle, a volume adjustment strip, and a wireless receiver on/off toggle. All the status lights on the HP are white LEDs, except for the mute and wireless off lights—which are reddish-orange—and the wireless on light, which (for some strange reason) is blue. This last one messes up the aesthetics for me; we were so close to leaving behind the cliche blue LEDs but for this misstep. These controls work adequately, though the volume strip is kind of touchy.

Performance

I haven’t really opened up this machine and given it a strenuous performance test, but I’ve done quite a bit of multi-tasking and it handles everything in stride. YouTube HD 720p works flawlessly, as well. I suspect that 1080p would work perfectly, too, except that YouTube seems to be having trouble with the prebuffer—I’m on a very fast Ethernet connection here at Wayne, so bandwidth isn’t a problem. This test 1080p video stuttered horribly streaming from the site, but when I downloaded it and played it in Totem (on Ubuntu Linux) it was absolutely silky smooth (and gorgeous on the HP’s screen, might I add, such as this video is). In Linux one core or the other (the load kept switching) hovered around 70% with occasional peaks of around 90%, but there was absolutely no stuttering. I haven’t tested this in Windows 7 yet, but if it’s this good in Ubuntu, I can scarcely imagine it being worse in Windows, with the full benefit of official Intel drivers.

In general, UI elements draw lightning quick, and the overall experience feels quite snappy no matter which OS I’m on (Ubuntu or 7). The performance of the Core 2 Duo T6600 is roughly double that of the Core Duo T2400 that powers my Satellite, and while the latter was definitely no slouch, I recall that on the Satellite the release candidate of Windows 7 felt a little sluggish. I’m aware that (especially) RAM (both speed and quantity), FSB, and the hard drive all contribute to the overall speed equation, and since all are updated compared to those on my previous machine it’s difficult to say how much of a bearing the processor might have on any performance increase on the part of the HP. Still, anybody who feels that Windows 7 is bloated and slow isn’t running it on the right hardware—try a C2D with 4 GB of RAM and be amazed.

Battery Life

Used conservatively, this notebook has given me around three hours of battery life. Used aggressively (i.e. brightness jacked up, constant multitasking), around two is more realistic. This ain’t a netbook, and like I keep saying, most of the time it should be plugged in, anyway. It’s an immediate improvement over my Satellite, which currently has a battery life of about two minutes. All laptop batteries wear out after about two years, and for the last year of its life the Satellite had around ten minutes of battery life. Still, this one has better life right out of the gate compared to my Satellite when it was new, so I’m quite impressed. It’s glorious to be able to lie back on my bed after a day of squinting at the microscopic text on my Eee and bask in the luxuriousness of a proper notebook screen. It’s even better knowing it will last longer than ten minutes before the battery dies.

Multimedia

I really wish I had a DVD (or a dozen) here on campus to test out the multimedia capabilities of this machine more, but rest assured that all the component parts should add up to a wonderful experience. I can say (with a sigh of relief, might I add) that the audio on this HP is excellent. The speakers aren’t great, but the actual audio hardware itself is wonderful. Very clean, free of distortion, a more spacious soundstage than that of the iPod on which I do most of my music listening (known for its rather closed soundstage, though still a benchmark standard), and with zero detectable amplifier noise at full volume. It’s on par with the sound I got from my Creative Audigy2 ZS Notebook (which, while it sounded very nice, was both cheaply made—it’s in pieces now—and which often suffered from skips and pops in the audio due to poor chipset compatibility). This is great because now I don’t need to have that card sticking out of the side of my computer. In fact, I can’t install this card on the HP because it still uses the ancient PCMCIA connection, which most computers had already left behind even when I bought my Satellite in 2006.

The screen, as evidenced in my preview of that YouTube HD video, is perfect for movies. Additionally, this notebook comes with an HDMI output, so you can hook up a 1080p HDTV and view your content that way if you so choose. I tested this feature and found it works perfectly. Windows 7 makes it trivial to set up an HDTV as a second monitor, and this dual-head setup yielded no noticeable slowdown. Sadly, the dv6-1355dx lacks a Blu-ray player, but there is a plethora of online video content—both free and for pay—and you should thus not be strapped to find content to enjoy with the dv6-1355dx. Plus, if you just gotta have Blu-ray, external drives are available. Trust me, this is not a “portable” computer—it belongs on a desk, or else hooked up to a gigantic HDTV and controlled via a wireless keyboard and mouse. An external drive, therefore, isn’t as much of a tether as you might imagine.

Experience

This is kind of a woolly section, but sometimes a bunch of nice specs and features don’t really add up to a great overall experience. In fact, it’s so far the opposite of this in the case of the HP dv6-1355dx that it’s remarkable. Using this machine over the past few days has been an absolute joy. Ubuntu brought with it a few hiccups, but that was because I opted for the 64-bit version, which has known problems with Adobe Flash (more below). Windows 7 has worked flawlessly. Throughout I’ve never felt that the machine lacked something I wish it had, nor that I was ever waiting an undue amount of time for the computer to complete a task. That said, coming from a 1280 x 800 pixel screen resolution I was a little disappointed at how little difference the HP’s extra 86 pixels horizontal resolution has made—and how much of an annoyance the lost 34 pixels of vertical resolution has become. The main offender is YouTube, where accessing the controls now requires scrolling—the video just fits, but I can’t monitor the playback progress without scrolling down. Pitiful. Resizing Firefox’s icons doesn’t help; in both Windows 7 and Ubuntu I have this problem.

But this is picayune. I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel to dig up dirt on this computer.

Crapware

This is probably my biggest complaint. My God did this thing ship with a boatload of crapware! I spent three hours cleansing this machine of virtually everything that wasn’t stock. HP even had the nerve to integrate the Wild Tangent games into the Games Explorer window in a way that required me to hack the Registry in order to delete their entries (the software itself had already been removed). Some of the software might have been useful—HP had a lot of multimedia software and supplementary programs for various other tasks, but I like a clean, lean, and mean system. Plus, I can download it all from HP’s website if I really want any single piece of software back again.

Compatibility with Linux

Wow. Just…wow. I have never had such an amazing Linux experience as I have so far had on the dv6-1355dx. I installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic 64-bit on here, and…get this…every single thing worked! I grazed my finger across the volume strip, sure it wouldn’t function, but to my utter shock a volume overlay appeared in the upper right corner. I tried various function keys—brightness, multimedia controls, sleep—everything works absolutely perfectly. These never worked on my Satellite, no matter how many workarounds I tried. I swear, it’s like Ubuntu was made on this HP laptop which, of course, I know is quite absurd. Flash was whack, of course, but I found a workaround that fixed the non-responsive Flash video controls (which was the main thing keeping me from using Ubuntu full time on this computer). And just today I noticed another annoying bug, where the sound would not stop playing through the onboard speakers when headphones were plugged in. Another workaround exists (when I rediscover the sources of these, I’ll post links) that handily fixed the problem.

Performance is insanely great. Granted, performance was wonderful on my Toshiba Satellite, too, and it’s almost unfair that Windows 7 performs so well on this laptop—it always used to be that Windows was a bit sluggish and Ubuntu reigned supreme. Now the two are roughly equivalent in day-to-day use, and both run better than Ubuntu did on my Satellite. I’m not sure how much of this performance delta can be attributed to my choice of 64-bit Ubuntu (the T2400 didn’t support x86-64), but the UI is ultra-responsive. Multimedia applications work wonderfully, and video playback is top notch—as evidenced by that 1080p test video. I never downloaded the test video and played it on the Satellite, but I can’t imagine that it would play well—I will definitely make a point of testing this.

If I wanted to present the uninitiated a taste of Linux, I would drag out my dv6-1355dx and let them have a go on it—the OS is truly showcased on this machine, not simply because it performs so well, but because it worked virtually perfectly out of the box. I’m reminded just why I love Ubuntu so much when I use this machine—it positively flies on this hardware, and its resource usage is better than Windows 7 can ever hope to be. Case in point, I have Firefox open with a dozen tabs, several Nautilus windows minimized, Rhythmbox playing, and System Monitor running, and all told the OS is using around 620 MB of RAM. A similar scenario on Windows 7 would already be bumping up against 1.5 GB or so. In neither case would this machine be overly taxed—after all, it has 4 GB of RAM (and I can expand this up to 8 GB). But with Ubuntu I have far greater headroom, and Ubuntu is clearly far more efficient.

Final Words

Like I said before, it has been a long time since I’ve been this thoroughly impressed with a product. The HP dv6-1355dx is an absolute slam dunk. Aside from those who can only buy one computer and who need something ultra-portable, or those who need extreme gaming performance, I can’t think of anybody whom this computer wouldn’t please…unless it’s a Mac person, and we all know they’re hopeless. All kidding aside (I love Apple, really), this machine is phenomenal, not simply because it performed everything well right out of the box, but because even after melding it to my strict and specific software profile, it still managed to do everything near perfectly. I would have loved it even more if I hadn’t had to spend three hours cleaning out all the crapware, but at this point that’s water under the bridge. I’ve got Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 running in perfect harmony, and I couldn’t be happier.

If you need portable, get a netbook (and I did). If you want a great desktop replacement notebook, the HP dv6-1355dx would make an excellent choice. I award this laptop a perfect five-out-of-five. Absolutely phenomenal.