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I was battling to choose between G505S from Lenovo vs this HP laptop - for the G505s offers better spec and at a lesser price ( 30 K) - Finally, I went with HP considering the support quality post sales and that its a 6 cell battery comapred to Lenovo's G505s 4 cell battery - justifying to myself the additional cost for i will pay to compensate the loss of not going for Lenovo G505s + no heating issues reported on this HP model in the reviews till now. I recieved the laptop - my observations : Pros : + Sleek model + Light weight with Battery + Awesome Display +battery back up came to 3 hrs with Wifi ON + noise less running when placed on the work table. ( But could hear the noise when on the lap ) Cons : - The DVD drive is place on the side and at the lower end - when you eject the drive open - its coming out with screech sound as its touching the surface even before it's ejected - Quite surprised that HP missed it in their product design ! - The Function keyboards on the top row are very much small - you need to literally stop your typing flow to check what you want to choose from this row ... there is ample room for the wrist ... a little thoughtful design at HP end would have made it comfortable to read and use. - The Plastic body of the DVD ROM bends when you lift the laptop making a breaking sound ... remember i mentioned that the DVD drive is positioned in the lower part of the laptop base ( that's a bad design ) I am not sure if this is a better buy compared to G505S - but mathematically its not. But a product is not just based on price - but on the reliability and quality of it too.. I believed in HP for its quality but still seems there are always some gaps in budget laptops. +++++>>>> Some Points to add after a month +The Laptop is absolutely brilliant in all points mentioned above as Pros. + Absolutely no heating issues + Battery backup maintains to 3hours with wifi ON . + Absolutely brilliant Display . + Not a single issue - i am using vmware client - works cool Cons : - The Bluetooth driver version compatible for windows 8.1 is still not available. does not matter much . ++++++++++++++++>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> After 2 months . Absolutely brilliant performance . People who report of heat issues pl install the HP Coolsense software from the HP portal. I have absolutely no heat issues even earlier - but installed the HP Coolsense to take advantage of the available utility software. All Pros Only experienced - NO CONS except for what i already mentioned in my review. -Bluetooth driver still not working .. i stopped running behind this with HP team as it was not going anywhere and was wasting my effort. Also , suggest to install the HP 3D drive guard from HP support page to make use of drive protection... do a little reading in the web page of HP to understand it . ALL IS WELL with this product :). SO I WILL RECOMMEND IT FOR A BUY ! WORTH THE MONEY IF U GET IT IN EXCHANGE OFFER IN FLIPKART FOR 29K. All the BEST !
I got this laptop so to use Open Source Community supported OS like Ubuntu. It's bit complicated but I managed it. For Installing Ubuntu: 1. Only Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS 64-bit has required Display Drivers 2. If you install latest Release 13.10 or 12.10 LTS directly it'll not work 3. So first Install Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS 64-bit 4. The Release Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS 64-bit is Not having Wifi Drivers so: 4.1. Connect to Wired Network WAN/LAN 4.2. Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 LTS 64-bit the Latest LTS 4.3. Upgrade to latest release Ubuntu 13.10 LTS 64-bit 4.4. Ubuntu 13.10 LTS 64-bit has Wifi Drivers I'll give this Laptop 4* for only one reason the complications involved in Installing Ubuntu... Will provide more feedback as I use it... Note: I was disappointed by Flipkart as they didn't deliver the Order as per promised Free "In a Day Guarantee". Didn't get any communication for reason/information about delay, had to follow-up by sending Emails explicitly.
here are the specs: AMD A10 4600U Processor 8GB Ram 1TB 5400rpm HDD 1GB dedicated graphics (Radeon 8xxxM series) 15.6 inch screen DOS and generally manufacturers do not mention but it has RaLink RT3290 wireless module. Why did i choose this? well... i thought this is a reasonable spec at a reasonable price. AMD means substantially cheaper than Intel, with not so bad performance. Additional graphics meant, it will compensate for my processor speed and will help when i do graphics (i do digital artwork..sometimes) DOS means i can install Linux or some free OS without having to pay for Windows. As such i am tired of using it in office. so i ordered it online, got it in a day.. all well.. and then i got down to install OS on it and indeed it was tough getting something on it.. Fedora 20: could not get it to install... it could not handle the graphics Sabayon 14: downloaded an amd_64 version and installed it. wireless wouldn't work. it seems 3.10 kernel has some issues handling RT3290 module, but supposed to be fixed in 3.12 release (at-least in Ubuntu), but no such luck with Sabayon oh by the way i got stuck in installation... it was looking at disk label as 'GPT'. i had to do it mid-way from command line (ctrl + alt + F2) Linux Mint 16: most weird, because it worked through live usb, but when i installed, it could not handle the graphics. the wireless did not work in live environment but i was hoping to follow recommended tweaks in ubuntu to get it to work.. and then i tried lesser known 'Bodhi Linux' it came up fine in the live environment but would not connect to wireless i contemplated on FreeBSD, but dropped the idea. i do not have much exposure on it. finally, i saw Mageia 4 - a Mandriva based distro. by this time i was so tired of Live systems.. i simply installed it. it was nice enough to ask me if i wanted to use newer version of my graphics during installation. Installation finished without any hiccups. When i tried connecting Wireless.. at first it did not, but on second attempt it did and was stable and was wonderful :) phew.. i thought i am not going to be able to use this system after all without having to buy Windows. Looks like it is built for windows.
I purchased this laptop in the last week of December 2013. The packing and delivery by WS Retail was excellent. I take care to buy stuff only from WS Retail and not other third party sellers. Coming to the technical aspects, I wanted a laptop without OS an I selected this. There was an equivalent model from Lenovo, but i went for HP brand name. The laptop is good looking with good finish. Nevertheless, HP could have made it a little bit sturdy like their ProBooks. This laptop is not too heavy. It comes with Free DOS preinstalled which is anyways useless. I installed Linuxmint Debian Edition (LMDE) rolling distribution, a Debian GNU/Linux flavour, to avoid the hassle of reinstalling OS frequently. The latest update of the AMD fglrx (FireGL and Radeon for X) drivers by Debian/LMDE allows me to switch between the integrated GPU and dedicated GPU. The IGPU takes 768MB of RAM from the main memory and the DGPU has a dedicated 1GB RAM. I am not a great admirer of games, so I don't want to talk about the performance in terms of gaming. I use this for numerical/computational purposes. Software like GCC, GNU Octave, R, Scilab, Matplotlib, GNUPLOT, OpenFOAM, GIMP, TEXLIVE etc works well in the LMDE environment with the hardware. As with most of the GNU/Linux based operating systems, the battery backup is slightly less than what one experiences with commercial closed source OSs. However the battery lasts up to 3 hours for normal browsing, video and other operations. The amount of heat developed is also a bit higher which again can be attributed to GNU/Linux OS. Its advisable to use a cooling pad when using the laptop for computational purpose. Overall, its a good laptop. But its all personal whether to go for HP or a different manufacturer. What ever I have written here is my experience with the laptop in the last 7 weeks.
I bought the laptop on exchange offer and the price is simply awesome for the specs I got. The battery life is good and the laptop works like a charm thanks to quad core and 8gb RAM. The only issue is the laptop is incompatible with old versions of Windows. I could not get the drivers to work with Windows 7 on this laptop. You will have to buy Windows 8.1 if you want to use this laptop with Windows
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