17.3" HP Pavilion 17-e118dx
via Amazon
Anodised silver HP Pavilion 17-e118dx is a budget priced 17.3 inch laptop PC with a quad core AMD A8 processor, ample storage space, HD+ bright screen that is great for things like web surfing, Microsoft Word and Excel, music, movies and lighter gaming on a large screen- daily mobile computing. It seems to be one of the best price/value 17 inch laptops on the market, that is more of a desktop replacement than a portable compact PC.
HP Pavilion comes with an AMD Quad-Core A8-4500M accelerated processor (4MB L2 Cache) with 1.9GHz up to 2.8GHz speed with AMD’s Turbo Core technology for optimal smooth performance in single and multi-threaded applications, 4GB DDR3L SDRAM to multitask smoothly and expandable to a maximum of 8GB, 750GB SATA hard drive at 5400rpm spindle speed as quite a large storage at this price level and fast read and write times and HP ProtectSmart that is available on all HP laptops for protecting your data against bumps or drops by automatically locking your fragile HDD- kind of an airbag mechanism, 25GB of Cloud based storage from Box for life to give you access to your data wherever you are and the 64-bit version of the Windows 8.1 operating system.
17.3" LED backlit diagonal HD display with Brightview, 1600 x 900 screen resolution, AMD Radeon HD 7640G discrete graphics with a video memory of 2158MB for crisp great visuals, lively colours and some gaming performance. Watching movies is fun on its 17 inch HD+ screen and you have the HDMI connection if you’d like to connect to your larger screen HDTV. This is not a PC for playing the latest 3D games at high settings but you will be more than fine with games like World of Warcraft and older titles- good for light to moderate gaming. Sound is loud and sharp although not amazing with the DTS Sound+ and decent double stereo speakers. It has a front-facing HP TrueVision HD webcam with an integrated microphone for great live chats on Skype.
HP Imprint finish with micro dot design stylish HP Pavilion is portable enough- it weighs 6 pounds, so not really heavy considering it is a 17 inch model with a DVD drive and has the measurements of 10.50 x 16.50 x 1.30 inches. It has a full-size chiclet keyboard with a 10-key numeric pad for faster data entry, a responsive touchpad that supports multiple gestures to use on Windows 8 apps. We don’t have info on the battery life of its 6-cell 47WHr 2.2 Ah lithium-ion battery but it is reported to recharge quickly by one of the customers. Multiformat DVD±RW/CD-RW drive, 802.11b/g/n WLAN for high speed wireless connection, 10/100Base-T Ethernet LAN, a Multiformat Media Card Reader for Secure Digital cards, an HDMI port to connect to large screen HDTVs, 1 x Headphone-out/microphone-in combo jack, 2 USB 3.0 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port with RJ-45 connector, 2 Memory slots, a 15-pin VGA port, 3.5mm audio combo jack and a Security lock slot.
Conclusion: HP Pavilion 17-e118dx offers decent all-round performance, is very easy to set-up and works right out of the box. It is an Energy Star certified machine as it uses less energy and comes with the 30-day trial of Microsoft Office, HP Connected and CyberLink’s Media Suite, Power2Go and PhotoDirector which you may find useful. You may want to upgrade the memory to 8GB if you want smoother performance overall when you’re running a few programs and apps at once but 4GB should be more than adequate for most people and the 750GB HDD offers quite a large storage space for your multimedia files and documents.
As negative points, some people will still prefer their Windows 7, it is not suitable for advanced gaming but quite alright with moderate games, chassis is plastic but still looks more premium than the competitors’ and the internal components are solid and good quality, DVD drive is not very quiet but the 17-e118dx is still one of the best computers you can find at this price range. It is an economical choice for those that don’t want to spend a lot on a computer and prefer a fast computer with large 17.3 inch screen with nice visuals to use at for work or entertainment.
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