Furnace Disguised As A Laptop By M1er on May 06, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

When I first walked into Futureshop I had no intention of walking out the doors with a new laptop, that being said, I had been considering replacing my Alienware that was starting to become dated. When I decided that it would be time to get a new computer I decided against pouring all my money into a machine that would become dated in a years' time. I was pleasantly surprised though when I came across the HP Pavillion dv6000. At first glanced it had everything I needed, 4gb of DDR2 RAM, 2.0 Ghz Dual Core AMD Turion x64 processor, an nVIDIA GeForce 6600 with 256 mb of memory and a 320 GB hard drive (real capacity is only about 250). This was exactly what I had been looking for, and, too my shock it put me below budget, costing a mere $800.

I wasn't really concerned about the lack of a decent video card, because most of the computer games I do play are less demanding, however, any serious computer gamers will want to pass this up. For that matter, anybody who wants to use any slightly demanding programs for any extent of time will want to keep searching.

While this was a great deal in my opinion, computer buyers should be wary about things that computer manufacturers don't tell you about, and avoid impulse buying, especially with laptops. I failed to do my research and I got burned (literally). While the performance is great (in "high performance" mode) the reliability is lacking. The main cause for concern in reliability is the hard drive; even during idle the temperatures seem to be anywhere from 49°-55° and with demanding programs running the temperature have reached excess of 65°. To the average computer user these numbers might not mean anything, and could be brushed off as normal, but considering the HD manufacturer's boundaries suggest 55° as a maximum temperature, I am to say the least a little worried about my information stored on it. This seems to be a common problem with most HP laptops nowadays though. The CPU temperature can also get extremely high, but will cool down, and as long as it is cleaned from time to time, it should be fine. I have also found that when left on the "high performance" setting, opposed to "balanced" or "power saver," the temperatures seem to be higher. This is a slight problem since the only really useful setting is high performance.

All in all this is a good deal for the average computer user who wants to get some word documents done or check emails, but its overheating issue is holding it back from being able to play any games and perform even slightly demanding processes for any length of time.

Pros: RAM Capacity

Cons: Overheats and will Sometimes Shut down as a result