HP DV1133tx Entertainment Notebook

Big on looks

The new HP DV4 1133tx sports the same kind of satin finish that makes the DV 4 series standout wherever you happen to come across one. Dressed brilliantly in a bronze coloured imprint with silver outlines, this notebook looks good.

The notebook has a vibrant 14.1-inch screen with a native resolution of 1280x800 pixels. The screen is a special anti-glare glossy panel meant for easy working at various light conditions, but due to low brightness the display disappoints and is not at all helpful in working under bright light conditions. This notebook also has an integrated 1.3MP webcam along with array microphones on the glossy bezel.

Keyboard and touchpad have been given the same bronze colour to compliment the looks of the laptop. The keyboard is comfortable to work on and also the keys are big and spaced out well. Touchpad is very responsive but is small as compared to other notebooks and lacks a horizontal scroll.

The notebook has 3GB RAM for smooth Vista operation, upgradable up to 8GB, but this is surely an over kill for this laptop. It’s SATA HDD that showed a Drive Index (Max Data transfer rate achieved) of 62 MB/s while having a random access time of 17ms. So you will not have to wait for applications to load or commands to process.

As an entertainment PC, this notebook comes loaded with an analog TV tuner, Windows media centre, HDMI out and Dual remote controls. While playing HD content, videos are colourful and vibrant and there is no problem of freezing. Its audio is handled by Stereo Altec Lansing speakers that are big on sound output but are not very good when it comes to bass output.

This notebook performed well on most of our benchmarks and returned good scores. It scored 4268 marks in PCMark 05 which means that this laptop although not very good in terms of overall performance, but will be able to handle most present day applications like Ms office and Photoshop easily. 3D Mark05 returned a score of 3089 which is a low for most 3D intensive applications and for playing newer games.

A battery backup of 1 hour and 55 minutes, under standard test conditions, is good enough for a notebook with a 14.1-inch display but seriously speaking this is not enough for the road warrior, you might consider buying a 9 cell battery pack if you plan to use this notebook on the move.

To sum it up, HP DV4 1133TX is a notebook with good looks but with mediocre performance meant for people who want all-in-one solution for computing, entertainment and casual gaming.

Specs: Intel C2D T5800 2GHz, 3GB DDR2 667MHz, 320 GB HDD, Windows Vista Home Premium, 14.1in AG panel display 1280 x 800 resolution, Inbuilt analog TV tuner, wireless remote controls, Nvidia 9200M GS 512MB graphics card

Price: Rs. 47,990

Courtesy:Digit