HP Pavilion DV8135EA review

Although it's not uncommon to find desktop PCs with 250GB hard disk these days, there aren't many laptops with even a 100GB drive. So it's big news when one appears with 200GB of storage, although it does come courtesy of two 100GB drives.

Most laptops we see are Intel Centrino branded and have either a Pentium M processor or one of the new Core Duo chips - see our group test on page 56. Rather daringly for a big PC manufacturer, HP has instead decided to stand out from the crowd and use one of AMD's Turion processors. Like Intel's dual-core chips, the Turion is designed specifically for laptop use. It's smaller and thinner than the equivalent desktop processor, consumes less power and generates less heat. It's still a solid performer as well, but while it's benchmark performance is pretty good, a Core Duo laptop of a similar price would outperform it by a significant margin.

The Pavilion's graphics aren't up to much and the ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 graphics chipset is simply too slow to run many modern 3D games - our Call of Duty 2 gaming test crawled along at an unplayable 2.6 frames per second.

Bright display

Power isn't everything, though. For a laptop to be worth its asking price, it must also be well-designed and comfortable to use. Happily, we had few complaints on this score. The 17in widescreen display has a resolution of 1440 x 900, which is more than enough to fit lots on-screen. It displays bright, bold colours and our only complaint is that its matt coating takes the crisp edge off images.

Watching DVD movies was a more satisfactory experience and the speakers were great too - loud, well-balanced and among the best laptop speakers we've heard. So there's no need for messy external speakers, or restrictive headphones here. Plus there's a convenient mini-remote supplied, so you'll be able to control music and movies from across the room as well.

The keyboard is well laid out with no fiddly small keys, which is good news for typists. It also includes a separate numeric keypad for the easy entry of figures. The trackpad is large and accurate too, and has been correctly proportioned to the widescreen display. There are also plenty of external connectors, including four USB2 ports and a memory card reader that supports most common memory card formats.

Sturdy design

The Pavilion weighs a chunky - but not ridiculous - 3.4kg, so it's not so heavy that you can't carry it around, but too heavy for you to really want to. Battery life isn't really an issue for desktop replacements like this, but it managed a very respectable 1 hour and 48 minutes. It did well in our DVD movie playback test too, lasting for 2 hours and 5 minutes, enough to watch a film to the end.

There isn't all that much to say about this laptop's main selling point beyond that yes, it does indeed have 200GB of hard disk space. Each of the two 100GB drives appears separately in My Computer, giving you a total formatted capacity of 186.1GB - more than enough room for even biggest MP3 or video collection. But, if you want a laptop with lots of hard disk space because you want to install lots of games or edit large videos be warned - the Pavilion is just about powerful enough for the former, but it's certainly no gaming laptop.