Home > Consumer Reviews > HP Media Centre G6032, AMD Athlon 64 X2 TK53, 15" Widescreen, 2048 MB, 160 GB Hard-drive, 802.11b/g WLAN, Windows Vista Home Premium

I've recently bought this notebook and saw the discussion, so I thought I'd post my thoughts.

It's a nice little notebook. It's of average size which is good. Not too large to lug around all day but not to small so you're struggling to see the screen and type. The screen is very nice, nice and bright with good viewing angles. Haven't tried it outside in the sun yet.

Wireless seems good. It picked up more networks in the street than the wii. No dropouts when connected to my network. External switch to switch it on and off to save battery.

160Gb hard drive which is partitioned. D: (contains all the recovery stuff notebooks tend to come with) is 6.92Gb with 2.21Gb free. C: has, on first switching on, 122Gb free out of 142Gb.

I tend to ignore all the bundled software that come with new computers, I like to install what I want. This notebook contains all the usual Roxio CD/DVD burning stuff, 60 day trial for Norton Internet Security (which came off straight away and replaced with FSecure!). Can't find the 60 day trial of Office as advertised in the Amazon description. Works is installed, but who uses that these days?

The notebook comes with a Vista Experience rating of 2.4 where:
Processor 4.6
RAM 5.0
Graphics 2.8
Gaming Graphics 2.4
Hard drive 4.7

Obviously not for games but runs Areo perfectly. System properties show 1.97Gb or RAM.

Built quality is ok. The screen half is very solid however the keyboard half seems a little "plasticy" but nothing too bad.

All in all, and with Vista Home Premium installed and not the basic, I think it's a great little notebook for the price.

I got my laptop yesturday not from amazon but from Tesco's Extra store. It cost me £399 which is great value and i am delighted at its performance.

It was really easy to set up and had no problems what so ever i did everything first time. Connecting to my interent was a breeze. The sound is great and within the first hour of having it I managed to download Windows Live1Care, iTunes, File sharing software, and torrent software very easily.

The specification for the laptop is great considering the price with the dual core processor and better than average graphics. Also the RAM is on the more than average size and the Harddrive is big enough for a home user at 160GB.

Overall I'd say that this laptop is a great buy, great value for money and it looks neat and stylish. I would say that my laptop is Jet Black colour all over not the silver shown in the picture but that maybe because I bought from different supplier.

All in all a very good laptop!!

These laptops are well priced for the spec, but they have a common fault which seems to be occuring after a year or so, just when your warranty runs out. The problems being the WIFI network card fails, mainly on the AMD processor laptops. I am very dissapointed by the poor quality of the recent HP laptops having owned a few over the years. The WIFI problem is not cheap to fix after the warranty runs out as the motherboard may need to be replaced. Just look up in google "HP WIFI Problems" and see for yourself. If you do buy a HP laptop make sure to get an extended warranty. Another thing to mention is that this laptop gets very hot and is uncomfortable to put on your lap - which is what its designed for..!!! (HP did a recall for defective overheating batteries on some models)