I'm a 40 year old male living in the South East of England and working in the IT industry.
I'm a 40 year old male living in the South East of England and working in the IT industry.
Member since:23.12.2007
Reviews:7
After spending a number of weeks looking for a mid range laptop that I could run Linux on, I decided on this one (specifically the £530 PC World DV5-1110em variant) not because it's specification particularly stood out but because its a HP (reputable brand) and it's nice and shiny. By this time I'd resigned myself to having to pay for the bundled Windows Vista install which to be fair has some uses, for example updating my Tom Tom and well....probably some other things. Despite carrying out a fair amount of research into Linux compatible laptops I'd actually thrown caution to the wind as I didn't actually find anything about this model, so in the spirit of exploration I'd taken a gamble. Despite working in IT I'd managed to avoid Vista since release so this was my first real exposure and I can now say that Vista is not quick on this laptop despite the dual core 2.1GHz Turion CPU, 3GB RAM and 256M dedicated video memory. Next thing to do was install Linux (Fedora 10) from a USB stick. 30 minutes later I had a working Fedora install running from a 60Gb partition. Aside from the wireless toggle and brightness function keys everything "just worked" , including wireless networking, CPU freq scaling and webcam. Out of curiosity I then installed Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) with even better results (after installing the ath5k driver from backports) and this time the brightness controls worked too. Performance wise I'd estimate that Kubuntu boots twice as fast as Windows on this hardware and runs four times as fast.
Now to the hardware. The overall build quality is of the usual high HP standard with a robust looking hinge mechanism. The whole unit is glossy (did I mention how shiny it is?) black for the lid, and a chrome look to the body. The only area where I feel the build quality is let down is with the CD/DVD/Blu-Ray ray door which could do with being a bit more robust and opening/closing more positively.
The 1280x800 display is bright and vivid although the gloss finish may present issues with reflections in bright light (I've had no issue with this yet).
Battery life is around 2 hours (for Vista and Kubuntu) with the screen at mid brightness and wireless networking enabled which is nothing to write home about but acceptable for my circumstances.
The only gripe I have about the design is that the power adaptor plugs in at the the rear right side of the body which can get in the way of an external mouse if you're working in a restricted deskspace. (would have been better to place it at the back or use a right angled power connector).
In a nutshell, I'm pleased with this purchase and would recommend the hardware.
Update 07/06/09 Ubuntu 9.04 x64 works well on this hardware, except for the proprietary ATI video drivers which perform *very* poorly during video playback. However, the open source drivers turn in a perfectly adequate performance considering I don't use mine for gaming.
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(+) cool and quite robust trackpad, good display,64-bit windows 7 (-) few connectors,dell drivers only, not realy for gameing (most models), finger print prone!
Advantages: i can take it anyware and hook it up any place Disadvantages: wireless i had to buy a extra wireless because the wireless in the computer goes in and out
jadwadbmd 10.06.2009 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: off topic
Review of HP Pavilion dv5
Advantages: i can take it anyware and hook it up any place Disadvantages: wireless i had to buy a extra wireless because the wireless in the computer goes in and out
jadwadbmd 10.06.2009 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: off topic
Review of HP Pavilion dv5
Mar 25th, 2009
(Jun 7th, 2009)
very helpful by (100%):
