This review is from: HP Pavilion dm4-3170se 14-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program(What’s this?)
Update Aug 5, 2012: ###############
1. HP CoolSense does not obviate the need for a good laptop cooling pad. While the DM4 keeps its cool under normal operation, it needs help with heat dissipation with abnormally heavy duty processing (e.g., generating 1:1 previews in LR4 for 1000+ images from a recent event shoot.)
2. The touch pad’s position is off center relative to the space bar. I’ve encountered rare occasions when this causes unintended cursor movements.
3. The button to open the optical tray can be a bit hard to activate – due to the button’s raised profile and some play in the tray door.
I don’t consider these to be show stoppers – so I’m leaving the star rating alone for now.
Original Review ##########
About 2 years ago I was looking for an ultra portable Windows laptop with this wish list (in order of importance):
Portability – I needed it to come with me at a moment’s notice Computing muscle – as a software architect and teacher, it was important that the laptop keep up with my demands Large screen – I figured 13.3″ @ 1366×768 was the absolute minimum for my needs Usable touch pad – as I rely exclusively on the built-in touch pad Extended battery life – at least 4 hours.
After a lot of research, and a bad experience with a Toshiba T135-S1310, I settled on the Lenovo Ideapad U-450P, and raved about it here on Amazon. Unfortunately, the devil’s bargain was to trade off computing muscle (it used Intel’s CULV SU7300) in return for portability and battery life.
Fast forward 2 years, and I can finally check off “all of the above” with the DM4!
1. At just over 4 lbs, this is truly portable. 2. Its 3rd generation i5 chip makes it capable of chewing through serious business software. 3. Its 14″ screen @ 1600×900 resolution is generously large, with a gorgeous reflection-free matte finish. 4. Its touch pad is sensitive and accurate. 5. Decent battery life (Rated: 7.5 hours. Actual, under normal operation, is about 5 hours.)
Other key features? #############
1. Cold to running in an amazing 30 seconds! Up from standby in under 5 seconds! (Really.)
2. Great computing horsepower for tasks such as running MS Office 2010, or Adobe’s LR4/PSE. Again, the startup time with these applications is simply amazing.
3. Awesome ergonomics. Its display is clean and bright, text is crisp and readable (even at its native resolution), its keyboard is firm and responsive (lets me touch type without fatigue), its touchpad is very usable, its wrist rest is surprisingly comfortable, and the red keyboard backlight is very non distracting.
4. Very respectable Windows Experience Index numbers (out of a max possible of 7.9): [CPU: 7.1 | RAM: 7.5 | Graphics: 5.4 | Gaming Graphics: 6.4 | Hard Disk: 5.9]
5. Cool operation. After 4 hours of use, it had only heated up on par with my far less powerful Lenovo.
6. Quiet operation. You can barely hear its fan, allowing it to be used to drive videos to a TV without distraction. (It supports wireless video using Widi.)
7. Less bloatware than most. Other than a trial Norton, a trial MS Office, and a few web redirect icons, most are well intentioned HP utilities that might be considered a value add. Especially noteworthy is HP’s Support Assistant – it automatically processed even a BIOS update.
8. Its 2×2 300 Mbps 2.4Ghz single band wireless b/g/n card also speeds up browsing. I watched a 2 hour streaming HD video without a hiccup.
9. I prefer the convenience of its integrated DVD+RW drive. However, it does not support Bluray, which is typical of this class of machines.
Any annoyances? ############ Yes. Fortunately they were minor.
1. The function keys (F1-F12) default to action mode (e.g., modify brightness). This prevents their use as standard function keys, and also makes it easy to disable the wifi card by accidentally hitting F12. Fortunately, this is fixable in the BIOS. This computer boots so quickly that I couldn’t read the initial instructions to get into the BIOS. (Press Esc while it is starting up.)
2. The touchpad is slightly off center with respect to the space bar, increasing travel distance for right clicks.
3. Pet peeve: Why does no one include recovery discs with their machines?
4. The omnipresent Beats branding is borderline narcissistic (even the B key is a tiny logo).
Who is this for? ########### There is a premium here for the ability to run multiple simultaneous heavy duty business applications in a light package.
However, it is overkill if your needs are less strenuous and you don’t need the future proofing that it provides. Its lack of discrete graphics also leaves it far from being a gaming…
This review is from: HP Pavilion dm4-3170se 14-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
I purchased this laptop directly from HP (so you will not see a Amazon Verified purchase tag for this review). This is a very nice laptop overall. The matte screen is quite bright and has a great resolution unlike most other laptops of this class in the market. The weight is also just right. Its not ultrabook light but its not very far off compared to all the extras you get. The Hybrid drive enables the laptop to boot up very quickly but I do not understand why HP had to downgrade to a 5400RPM drive when the older generation DM4-3090se used a 7200RPM drive. Also, it would have been better to put in 8GB of RAM instead of 6GB.. though the RAM in this model is DDR3 1600 MHz (which is an improvement over the DDR3 1333MHz used in previous gen). The HP sleeve they give is a nice touch but it is pretty basic – you would still need to buy a proper sleeve. One issue I do have with HP is the excessive amount of HP software that they just cram in – most of it is not really useful at all. There are like dozens of softwares installed most of which don’t really do much. It would be nice if HP would just install one software suite which would have all essential things instead of having a different software and service running for each of them.
I also recommend the “Case Logic VNA214 14.1-Inch Laptop Attache” bag for this laptop which is a perfect case for this laptop.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
This review is from: HP Pavilion dm4-3170se 14-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program(What’s this?)
All in all, we are very pleased with this laptop. My wife’s vision is getting a little worse as she is getting older and is buying reading glasses in order to see clearly. However, this laptop features red backlit keys that are so easy to read that she has no need for them while working on Girl Scouts, etc.
All of the computer specs are clearly labeled in the product description above (i5 processor, 500 GB hard drive, etc.), so all that’s really left to discuss is how well this laptop operates. In a word, fast. Even for my Alienware i7 quad core, this laptop takes its run for the money to startup and shut down VERY quickly and that is after some fairly heavy browsing, installation of Microsoft Office 2010, a formal installation of Norton Internet Security 2012, etc. With all the little, obsequious add-ons that proliferate just about every web page these days, this laptop takes it all in stride and works quite well. Even with the 5400 rpm drive (a disappointment, but understandable in terms of keeping power/heat low), it is quite responsive and there is no noticeable lag in any of the applications that we open.
Battery life is impressive, although I imagine that you are going to be running at a very lowly lit screen and downgraded video performance to get the full 7.5 hours of battery life advertised. With more typical settings, the battery life still shows an excess of 5 hours which is plenty good for our use.
Even if you don’t have Microsoft Office 2010 (not included–we have our own license), you can still view your e-mail via the embedded Windows Live Mail feature. Although not as full-featured as Outlook (i.e., calendar, etc.), it will allow you to send/receive e-mail without additional expense. The laptop also does come with a free 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security 2012, but we went ahead and picked up the software ourselves anyway.
The laptop does feature a pinhole “HD” camera that will allow you to Skype and although it’s not mind-blowingly great image quality in low light (it’s a pinhole, mind you), it serves its function quite well without need for an additional peripheral. Built-in speakers work well enough to communicate, although there is a provided headphone jack for your use.
My wife has already tried the fingerprint security software that’s on the keyboard and HP walks you through the instructions in its use. It also appears to work well and my attempts at entering passwords on web sites using the fingerprint scanner met with failure; it would only recognize hers, as designed. However, I’m just as happy using Norton Internet Security to store and regulate my passwords just as well–to each their own.
Now as for “Beats”…well, I did put it through the gamut of songs. I have over 15,000 songs in my collection, so although I don’t claim to be an audiophile, I can say that I have developed a certain acoustical palate over the years. I don’t own a pair of “Beats” headphones, but I did have my Bose AEs so I figured that if I compared the audio from my own Alienware against the laptop then I was still doing an apple to apple comparison. My Alienware has an integrated 7.1 THX-certified sound system. To be perfectly honest, I could not discern a difference between the HP and the Alienware. I used Deadmau5′s “I Remember”, Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”, Nickelback’s “This Is War” and “Photograph”, and Lush’s wall-of-sound “Sweetness And Light”…and I am hard pressed to tell you, if blindfolded, that there is any difference. So both computers sound AMAZING to me, but I don’t think that the “Beats”-factor is really anything to scream about.
What is even more curious has to be HP’s choice in the target demographic. Although the “Beats” logo is destined to draw in the younger crowd (hell, look at the Olympics – just about every other athlete is wearing their headphones prior to a swim match and recent arrivals of exchange students in our community reveals that they are popular with teens in Europe as well), the HP embedded software still seems to be targeted to an older demographic, offering chances to automate a bunch of settings. Most young people that I know are fully capable of maintaining their own computer and I found the embedded HP software curious as an add-on. People like my mother-in-law would probably deeply appreciate letting HP check updates, etc., for them, but for a tech-savvy person like myself, I wish that I could rid myself of it. However, it does appear to be embedded into the OS architecture itself, so no dice. The good news, however, is that it doesn’t appear to detract from the overall performance of the PC itself (as previous HP iterations in the past USED to drag their systems down), so I just pretend it’s not there.
The provided disc player will allow you to burn DVDs and play Blu-Rays on the 1600×900 resolution screen. It won’t defeat a high-end HDTV, but…
Authors bio is coming up shortly. 
Runs rings around my expectations,
Update Aug 5, 2012:
###############
1. HP CoolSense does not obviate the need for a good laptop cooling pad. While the DM4 keeps its cool under normal operation, it needs help with heat dissipation with abnormally heavy duty processing (e.g., generating 1:1 previews in LR4 for 1000+ images from a recent event shoot.)
2. The touch pad’s position is off center relative to the space bar. I’ve encountered rare occasions when this causes unintended cursor movements.
3. The button to open the optical tray can be a bit hard to activate – due to the button’s raised profile and some play in the tray door.
I don’t consider these to be show stoppers – so I’m leaving the star rating alone for now.
Original Review
##########
About 2 years ago I was looking for an ultra portable Windows laptop with this wish list (in order of importance):
Portability – I needed it to come with me at a moment’s notice
Computing muscle – as a software architect and teacher, it was important that the laptop keep up with my demands
Large screen – I figured 13.3″ @ 1366×768 was the absolute minimum for my needs
Usable touch pad – as I rely exclusively on the built-in touch pad
Extended battery life – at least 4 hours.
After a lot of research, and a bad experience with a Toshiba T135-S1310, I settled on the Lenovo Ideapad U-450P, and raved about it here on Amazon. Unfortunately, the devil’s bargain was to trade off computing muscle (it used Intel’s CULV SU7300) in return for portability and battery life.
Fast forward 2 years, and I can finally check off “all of the above” with the DM4!
1. At just over 4 lbs, this is truly portable.
2. Its 3rd generation i5 chip makes it capable of chewing through serious business software.
3. Its 14″ screen @ 1600×900 resolution is generously large, with a gorgeous reflection-free matte finish.
4. Its touch pad is sensitive and accurate.
5. Decent battery life (Rated: 7.5 hours. Actual, under normal operation, is about 5 hours.)
Other key features?
#############
1. Cold to running in an amazing 30 seconds! Up from standby in under 5 seconds! (Really.)
2. Great computing horsepower for tasks such as running MS Office 2010, or Adobe’s LR4/PSE. Again, the startup time with these applications is simply amazing.
3. Awesome ergonomics. Its display is clean and bright, text is crisp and readable (even at its native resolution), its keyboard is firm and responsive (lets me touch type without fatigue), its touchpad is very usable, its wrist rest is surprisingly comfortable, and the red keyboard backlight is very non distracting.
4. Very respectable Windows Experience Index numbers (out of a max possible of 7.9):
[CPU: 7.1 | RAM: 7.5 | Graphics: 5.4 | Gaming Graphics: 6.4 | Hard Disk: 5.9]
5. Cool operation. After 4 hours of use, it had only heated up on par with my far less powerful Lenovo.
6. Quiet operation. You can barely hear its fan, allowing it to be used to drive videos to a TV without distraction. (It supports wireless video using Widi.)
7. Less bloatware than most. Other than a trial Norton, a trial MS Office, and a few web redirect icons, most are well intentioned HP utilities that might be considered a value add. Especially noteworthy is HP’s Support Assistant – it automatically processed even a BIOS update.
8. Its 2×2 300 Mbps 2.4Ghz single band wireless b/g/n card also speeds up browsing. I watched a 2 hour streaming HD video without a hiccup.
9. I prefer the convenience of its integrated DVD+RW drive. However, it does not support Bluray, which is typical of this class of machines.
Any annoyances?
############
Yes. Fortunately they were minor.
1. The function keys (F1-F12) default to action mode (e.g., modify brightness). This prevents their use as standard function keys, and also makes it easy to disable the wifi card by accidentally hitting F12. Fortunately, this is fixable in the BIOS. This computer boots so quickly that I couldn’t read the initial instructions to get into the BIOS. (Press Esc while it is starting up.)
2. The touchpad is slightly off center with respect to the space bar, increasing travel distance for right clicks.
3. Pet peeve: Why does no one include recovery discs with their machines?
4. The omnipresent Beats branding is borderline narcissistic (even the B key is a tiny logo).
Who is this for?
###########
There is a premium here for the ability to run multiple simultaneous heavy duty business applications in a light package.
However, it is overkill if your needs are less strenuous and you don’t need the future proofing that it provides. Its lack of discrete graphics also leaves it far from being a gaming…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|Overall, a very nice laptop,
I purchased this laptop directly from HP (so you will not see a Amazon Verified purchase tag for this review). This is a very nice laptop overall. The matte screen is quite bright and has a great resolution unlike most other laptops of this class in the market. The weight is also just right. Its not ultrabook light but its not very far off compared to all the extras you get. The Hybrid drive enables the laptop to boot up very quickly but I do not understand why HP had to downgrade to a 5400RPM drive when the older generation DM4-3090se used a 7200RPM drive. Also, it would have been better to put in 8GB of RAM instead of 6GB.. though the RAM in this model is DDR3 1600 MHz (which is an improvement over the DDR3 1333MHz used in previous gen). The HP sleeve they give is a nice touch but it is pretty basic – you would still need to buy a proper sleeve. One issue I do have with HP is the excessive amount of HP software that they just cram in – most of it is not really useful at all. There are like dozens of softwares installed most of which don’t really do much. It would be nice if HP would just install one software suite which would have all essential things instead of having a different software and service running for each of them.
I also recommend the “Case Logic VNA214 14.1-Inch Laptop Attache” bag for this laptop which is a perfect case for this laptop.
Was this review helpful to you?
|4.5 stars, but a very nice laptop,
All in all, we are very pleased with this laptop. My wife’s vision is getting a little worse as she is getting older and is buying reading glasses in order to see clearly. However, this laptop features red backlit keys that are so easy to read that she has no need for them while working on Girl Scouts, etc.
All of the computer specs are clearly labeled in the product description above (i5 processor, 500 GB hard drive, etc.), so all that’s really left to discuss is how well this laptop operates. In a word, fast. Even for my Alienware i7 quad core, this laptop takes its run for the money to startup and shut down VERY quickly and that is after some fairly heavy browsing, installation of Microsoft Office 2010, a formal installation of Norton Internet Security 2012, etc. With all the little, obsequious add-ons that proliferate just about every web page these days, this laptop takes it all in stride and works quite well. Even with the 5400 rpm drive (a disappointment, but understandable in terms of keeping power/heat low), it is quite responsive and there is no noticeable lag in any of the applications that we open.
Battery life is impressive, although I imagine that you are going to be running at a very lowly lit screen and downgraded video performance to get the full 7.5 hours of battery life advertised. With more typical settings, the battery life still shows an excess of 5 hours which is plenty good for our use.
Even if you don’t have Microsoft Office 2010 (not included–we have our own license), you can still view your e-mail via the embedded Windows Live Mail feature. Although not as full-featured as Outlook (i.e., calendar, etc.), it will allow you to send/receive e-mail without additional expense. The laptop also does come with a free 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security 2012, but we went ahead and picked up the software ourselves anyway.
The laptop does feature a pinhole “HD” camera that will allow you to Skype and although it’s not mind-blowingly great image quality in low light (it’s a pinhole, mind you), it serves its function quite well without need for an additional peripheral. Built-in speakers work well enough to communicate, although there is a provided headphone jack for your use.
My wife has already tried the fingerprint security software that’s on the keyboard and HP walks you through the instructions in its use. It also appears to work well and my attempts at entering passwords on web sites using the fingerprint scanner met with failure; it would only recognize hers, as designed. However, I’m just as happy using Norton Internet Security to store and regulate my passwords just as well–to each their own.
Now as for “Beats”…well, I did put it through the gamut of songs. I have over 15,000 songs in my collection, so although I don’t claim to be an audiophile, I can say that I have developed a certain acoustical palate over the years. I don’t own a pair of “Beats” headphones, but I did have my Bose AEs so I figured that if I compared the audio from my own Alienware against the laptop then I was still doing an apple to apple comparison. My Alienware has an integrated 7.1 THX-certified sound system. To be perfectly honest, I could not discern a difference between the HP and the Alienware. I used Deadmau5′s “I Remember”, Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”, Nickelback’s “This Is War” and “Photograph”, and Lush’s wall-of-sound “Sweetness And Light”…and I am hard pressed to tell you, if blindfolded, that there is any difference. So both computers sound AMAZING to me, but I don’t think that the “Beats”-factor is really anything to scream about.
What is even more curious has to be HP’s choice in the target demographic. Although the “Beats” logo is destined to draw in the younger crowd (hell, look at the Olympics – just about every other athlete is wearing their headphones prior to a swim match and recent arrivals of exchange students in our community reveals that they are popular with teens in Europe as well), the HP embedded software still seems to be targeted to an older demographic, offering chances to automate a bunch of settings. Most young people that I know are fully capable of maintaining their own computer and I found the embedded HP software curious as an add-on. People like my mother-in-law would probably deeply appreciate letting HP check updates, etc., for them, but for a tech-savvy person like myself, I wish that I could rid myself of it. However, it does appear to be embedded into the OS architecture itself, so no dice. The good news, however, is that it doesn’t appear to detract from the overall performance of the PC itself (as previous HP iterations in the past USED to drag their systems down), so I just pretend it’s not there.
The provided disc player will allow you to burn DVDs and play Blu-Rays on the 1600×900 resolution screen. It won’t defeat a high-end HDTV, but…
Read more
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