Ayesh Arie World

By Anonymous on Feb 8, 2010 | Reply

I purchased the HP G60-237NR notebook PC in February for less than 550.00. This laptop has all the features and ports I needed. I have had good customer service from HP when I had questions. I have Vista and we bought this same laptop for my Mom last month at Amazon with the new Windows7. I would recommend this laptop for the average user. I use it for email, shopping the web, MS application software, Skype, LinkedIn, DVD play, and watching Hulu tv over the web. The volume was not loud enough to watch a DVD movie while on vacation in our RV so I bought small external speakers to plug in at a cost of less than $30.00.

By Utah on Feb 8, 2010 | Reply

I’m quite happy with the laptop as-shipped. The packing was good, and the laptop arrived in good condition. It comes with a little pad of paper, some other misc junk, and a cloth for polishing the case. The shiny case, by the way, is one of two drawbacks. It looks pretty with most surfaces being shiny, but the glossy black cover constantly has fingerprints (and palm prints) on it. A positive to the shiny surface is that it’s relatively easy to peel off all of the NASCAR-level of sponsor labels. The other drawback to this laptop is that it doesn’t have built-in Bluetooth. Seriously. It has a Wireless N interface – which I’m pretty sure wasn’t even an approved standard when this was made – but no Bluetooth? Oh well. I had a Kensington Bluetooth adapter which is one of those little ones that you leave in a USB port, and it works well (under both Linux and Windows 7).

That leads me to the good things. Ubuntu 9.10 installed on this machine with no problems. The volume keys and hardware graphics acceleration work fine, and multiple monitors (using the internal LCD and an external display) work out of the box. The button to disable the trackpad and the wireless disable button both work under Ubuntu (as do the corresponding LEDs). The indicator LEDs for things like caps lock, num lock, the trackpad, and the wireless all blend into the laptop nicely. Wired and wireless (B and G, at least) both work properly. NTFS resizing also worked fine. The machine is fairly fast with both operating systems, though the 5400 RPM drive does hamper application start-up time. Graphics performance is very good for business applications; I don’t play games on a general purpose computer, though, so my standards may be lower than people who would spend more on a video card than I did on this whole laptop. I like the track pad pretty well, and the laptop feels reasonably sturdy. I haven’t tried the built-in HDMI output or media card readers under either OS yet. I’m assuming they’ll both work; I’ll post a follow-up if one fails. For the record, I would be willing to trade HDMI for Bluetooth as well.

The only other thing of note is the keyboard layout. There is an “end” key shared with the number 1 on the number pad, and another end above the number pad (sharing the scroll lock / sys req button). I’m fond of the “shift+end” (and shift+home) keyboard shortcuts to select everything from the cursor to the end (or beginning) of the line. However, pressing “shift” and the closer “end” key actually makes the keyboard type a 1. That’s minor, but it does annoy me.

Speaking of minor annoyances – no Windows install media is shipped (I’ll bet a CD costs less than the paper notepad and microfiber cloth HP chose to bundle). You can create a set of install disks if you want using an included tool, though (only single-sided supported by the tool, even though there’s a dual-layer burner here); make sure you do that before you wipe Windows off of the machine to install Linux. If nothing else, it’s easier to sell your license if you have media to go with it.

Overall, if I could get another one of these at the same price I bought this one for (a Black Friday deal, with a couple of other discounts including the current rebate deal) I would not hesitate to do so. Yeah, I spent most of this review griping about little things, but the main good things are already patently obvious. The CPU and memory included are very good, the drive capacity is good (despite being slower than a 7200 RPM drive), the screen quality is excellent, and the sound is good for a laptop. Windows 7 doesn’t suck as much as Windows has in the past, and the Linux support on this device is very good.

Update: I finally got around to testing the HDMI (translation: I finally got a TV with HDMI support), and both video and audio work fine out of the box under Ubuntu 9.10; plug the cable in, start up the display preferences, and you have another monitor you can either extend or clone your desktop over to – then go to the sound preferences and change the default output device from the on-board sound to the hdmi output if you want sound over HDMI. Multiple monitors work fine with the RGB cable on the back as well. However, I haven’t attempted HDMI and RGB external connections simultaneously; I suspect that such an arrangement won’t work as expected.