HP Pavilion 14-B172TX Laptop (Core i5 3rd Gen/4 GB/500 GB/Windows 8/1)

I bought this piece of machine from a retailer after doing an extensive research of 10 days. Although the price I got it for was the same as shown on flipkart, I dint buy it here. Its a stupid reason, its weight is wrongly mentioned on flipkart as 2 Kg, its actually 1.8 Kg which the retailer confirmed it with me, and I got lured to buy it since I was looking for a laptop under psychological 2Kg mark. Its been a week since I have been using it, and I love this machine. Here are the pros and cons: Pros: 1) Touch screen is awesome at this price, I am having a great fun playing games as I do on my android phone. 2) Low weight. Believe me it matters even to carry a few hundred grams more of weight in a laptop than the lowest possible! Most companies provide >2Kg options only, Dell being the stupidiest one gives 2.8 Kg under this category! 3) Ultra low heat dissipation processor: TDP is just 17 W. Ivy bridge processor is scorching fast. Although company states its i5-3337U processor (benchmark is ~3150 which is pretty good), CPUZ tells me its i5-3427U whose benchmark is even higher ~ 3600! I am loving it ! The laptop doesnt get heat up at all in everyday use, like internet surfing, youtube, data transfers, and during my long mathematica program runs! I havent tried any games yet, not a game freak. HP Coolsense takes care of heat dissipation pretty well. 4) Decent battery runtime: I am experiencing 4-5 hours battery runtime in routine work after I optimized the settings (reduced brightness, removed unnecessary junk programs and services from startup and so on), which is pretty decent. 5) Extra graphics card: 1GB NVIDIA GeForce 630M is decent to play the high end games (have just read about it). In normal usage, this card is disabled and Intel HD4000 is running which is a good thing to save battery. During a high end graphical usage, NVIDIA is automatically enabled. 6) Altec lansing speakers are sufficiently loud. 7) The laptop is thin as the name suggests, its a sleekbook. Looks pretty sexy. 8) Keyboard is great to type since the touch pad is located in the center. It avoids unnecessary clicks. 9) Multitouch touchpad: Two finger touch response is used for scrolling and zooming in or out. I find it very convenient personally during web browsing. 10) 1.3 MP webcam works nice under low light conditions. 11) Got 3 years extended warranty for free as well as a 4000 Rs. gift voucher under hp student offer !!! Buying an HDMI to VGA adapter, 8 GB pendrive and a mouse using it :-) Cons: Having all that said, the laptop has some not-so-cool things which I compromised given the budget. They are following: 1) Glossy screen: I dont like it personally since its not much comfortable for outdoor use. A matt finish should have been better, though I am not sure if matt finish comes with touch screen. 2) Glossy finish of laptop body: prone to finger and palm prints and accumulates dust, requires routine dusting. 3) No VGA port, only HDMI: They have avoided this to reduce thickness. Who cares however, since HDMI to VGA converters are available (as stated earlier, buying using voucher) 4) 4-cell battery: 6 cell would have been luxurious. However, the laptop runtime is not bad (~5 hours). 5) No optical drive: Which moron uses that anyway ! :p Verdict: This piece is a must buy in ~50 K category. Just go for it, leave all other options aside.

I bought this laptop from which i am writing this review right now. Its been around a month I have been using it and I have seen its ups and downs. First of all I got this one in replacement of my old lenovo ideapad y430 which was 4 years old and flipkart gave me a decent 8k discount on this which brought down the price of laptop at awesome 42k with HP diwali offer which gave me goodies worth 4k (I bought keyboard, mouse, speakers etc.. ) and 1 year subscription of norton antivirus. So it was a good bargain for me. I've got configured this laptop for my office use as well so in office with minimal use of ms excel & PDF reader it gives awesome battery back up of 4-5 hours of work. so with just one charge of around 45 mins it works fine for me for the whole day. It can remain in sleep for almost overnight and thanks to improved windows 8.1 (i got free upgrade verry soon after purchase, which is now also available at windows store) It springs up to live in seconds ready for action. As a casual gamer I like the touch. It gives justice to the overall feel and look of windows 8.1. The apps are good, News/sports/cricinfo/facebook apps are pretty decent and give pop up notifications even when on desktop mode. The laptop has never got overheated for me, thanks to HP coolsense I guess, For photographers, The color rendering is beautiful, though Lightroom lags a bit during export of raw file to jpeg, but I have not seen any laptop/desktop yet which did not lag. The RAM is decent though the processor is just 1.8 GHz so... there is a trade off. I have not played any graphics hungry games on this so can't tell much about it. But I seriously believe this laptop is not a gaming laptop so gamers will get disappointed in it. Weight isn't an issue at all, it's much lighter than any mechanical engineering book I had carried during my college days. The keyboard is wider for my taste, In fact to bloggers and chatters I recommend to try and write a 1000 words paragraph on any laptop before purchase because It seriously slows you down if the keys are even a mm apart from where they should be. Music and movie lovers will like this laptop as the brightness of screen and clarity of speakers are pleasing to eyes and ears. Verdict, Its a good replacement to old laptop, well in budget for future which will be much touch oriented, so no point in buying a laptop with no touch screen support. Gamers may not like it cause it lags if pushed to the limit, though casual users and professionals will not have any problem. If you liked this review do give a thumbs Up. Happy shopping.