Home > Consumer Reviews > HP Pavilion DV9810US 17-inch Laptop (AMD Turion 64 X 2 Dual Core TL-60 Processor, 3 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD Drive, Vista Premium)

I've had no problem with the laptop to speak of, the screen is quite readable and bright, it plays the various games I've tried at high levels of graphics (Age of Empires III, Battle for Middle-earth I and II, and similar games).

This is a pretty good laptop that I've been happy with and would recommend. It is sufficient for my basic needs of Web surfing, organizing my music and photo collection, and playing solitaire. This is my first time using Vista, and I'm actually kind of impressed with it's ease of use. The only real problem I've had with it is that Vista would not allow me to install Microsoft Office 2003 until I disabled DEP (Data Execution Prevention) first. You would think, that a Microsoft operating system would be able to recognize another Microsoft product as being safe, but I guess not.

The battery life is short (a couple of hours), but I always use the AC charger, so I don't really care. The keyboard is spacious and comfortable. The screen quality is lovely.

The laptop includes a Blu-Ray drive and player that I've used a watch a half-dozen Blu-Ray movies connected to my big LCD TV via the laptop's HDMI port. The playback quality is very good and has only skipped a couple of times. The software that comes with the laptop for playing the movies is pretty bad, but it works. There are some noticeable bugs, like if you want the movie's audio to go through the HDMI cable to your TV instead of out of your laptop's little speakers, there is an audio-output property you must set. But this setting is only accessible by clicking on a little gear-shaped icon in the upper-right corner of the player window, and this icon is hidden unless the player window is made full screen. The bigger problem that is so far not documented or acknowledged by HP is that you can only output Blu-Ray movies on either the laptop's monitor or your TV, but not both at the same time (mirroring). If you try to play a Blu-Ray movie with the displays mirrored, it gives you an unhelpful message about the security of the disc being in violation. The fix for this is to press the Function-F4 key to send the display to only the TV, but then it can be awkward to use the mouse and keyboard on the laptop while looking at the interface on the TV.

The laptop comes with a little remote control, that is perhaps the worst remote control in the history of remote controls. It's tiny, about the size of a credit card, L-shaped, and only 3-4 mm thin (so it can fit in a slot on the laptop), which makes it very uncomfortable to hold. All of the buttons are shaped the same (circular blisters) and the icons printed on them are difficult to read in low light. It only has a range of 2-3 feet, and it must be pointed directly at the laptop. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a remote if you have to walk over to the computer to use it. It also seems like most of my key presses on the thing are being ignored. Like if I want to pause the movie, I have to press the pause button 5 times before it will actually do it. Maybe I need a new battery, but I would think the battery that comes with it would last at least a couple of months.

On the face of it the CPU is somewhat lightweight and so perhaps this is why another reviewer mentioned his desktop being faster. All told I'm impressed with it's wide feature-set - EVERYTHING works and no problems except the HP (not Microsoft!) volume control software (operated by the quickplay touch keys) sometimes leaves the volume bars on the screen and disrupts the machine. I've also not been able to create a recovery DVD - using the correct DVD-R. TV card works, DVD player, tons of RAM, 64-bit OS (and no compatibility issues), IE perfect, all slots, HDMI worked first time (and its AUDIO) :)), large HDD, 4 USB ports...etc, etc. Wireless perfect and fast. Vista works just fine on the machine - clearly a good match and it was up and running in just a few minutes. Though I'm a regular Amazon customer I bought mine from another vendor at around $200 less than Amazon and no sales tax.

Beautiful machine,no compliants to report.Like everyone else,not to crazy about Vista,but oh well.It's my first laptop,so far so good.

This computer has it all. Tons of RAM, Blu-ray 64 bit system
Vista is not backward compatible with all products but why should it be.
Tech moves forward fast and this baby is fast