Product Reviews

What would you expect from a laptop that costs under £500? Hopefully usable, but inevitably full of compromises in its design and components. In this case, however, it's a sleek-looking, solidly built, quality piece of kit. At the price currently on offer from www.cheap-it.com, the dv6226 is a laptop you'd expect to pay a lot more for.

First impressions are good. Instead of a flimsy case modelled on a Soviet prison, you get a curved, visually pleasing object with an interesting wavy line design etched on the lid. Open that and you're greeted with a silver body bearing a neat recessed keyboard. Don't open it too far, because trying to push the screen flat with the main body could break the hinge. In all other respects, though, this laptop feels robust, even though it weighs only 2.8kg.

Boot it up for the first time and you see what HP means by 'The computer is personal again'. The Vista Home Premium setup wizard has been customised to look prettier, although it ends up doing a marginally worse job than before. For example, once you tell the normal wizard that you live in the UK, it sets all the subsequent defaults to British. Not so the HP installer, which carries on assuming you want everything US-style until told otherwise. This kind of niggle aside, it does exactly the same things.

After the usual system benchmark that Vista runs once it's fully installed, an extra HP 'The computer is personal again' wizard kicks in to insist that you register your new laptop. There's no 'Later' option - you have to do it right there and then, online, before you've updated Windows with the latest security patches and installed your anti-virus software. That's poor practice, and like us you'll probably prefer to press Ctrl+Shift+Esc at this point to call up the Task Manager and force the registration program to end.

To finish installing and updating Vista you'll require a restart, and at this point you'll notice the laptop's one major flaw: the screen. As with some other cheap displays, the backlight leaks through the TFT layer unevenly, creating a large grey corona of light across the lower half of the screen when it should be uniformly black. You won't notice it while you're working or web browsing, as documents and web pages

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tend be mostly white, but DVD viewing is marred by it, and seeing this effect every time you boot up is annoying.

Internal affairs

In other respects, though, the screen is good: viewing angles are generously wide, and the resolution of 1,280 x 800 is plenty. Once you've booted into Vista and started work, you're likely to forget the light leak long before you forget that you got this laptop for under half a grand.

It really is an awesome laptop for the money. First off you've got your dual-core processor. It's a bit of a shock to see the Pentium name resurfacing, but in case you were thinking that this processor had long since had its day, the chip here isn't from the old Pentium M line but the new Pentium Dual Core Processor range. It's actually a modern Core 2 Duo at heart, with all the same features except a couple of things that won't make much difference to real world performance. Resurrecting the Pentium name is merely a marketing exercise so that Intel can milk this ludicrously successful brand a bit longer.

Both our benchmark tests and the everyday tasks we put the dv6226 through showed that this 1.6GHz processor is no slouch, and the supplied 1GB of RAM is sufficient for Windows Vista as long as you don't run too many programs at the same time. One thing that's still true of a £500 laptop, even this one, is that you can't expect to run serious 3D games on it, and as predicted it failed to handle our 3D test.

The 120GB hard disk is large enough for plenty of programs and files as well as all your music and movies. It also has a recovery section (or partition) in case Vista dies on you. This will return the laptop to 'factory condition', deleting all your data, so keeping a proper backup of your stuff is still vital.

It's the feel of a laptop when you're using it that really matters, and here the dv6226 excels. The keyboard is firm and confident, the keys strong and not at all flimsy, making typing a pleasure. And there are some really nice extra touches. Caps Lock has a small light next to so that you can quickly see if it's on or off. There's a row of touch-sensitive backlit buttons just above the keyboard that control video playback and volume, with the mute button and touch-sensitive volume slider particularly useful.

Around the sides are ports aplenty, with three USB 2 connectors and mini FireWire (useful for MiniDV camcorder users), plus a hardware switch for the built-in WiFi, which supports the a, b and g standards. And you even get a handy little remote to command the brilliant Media Center component of Vista Home Premium. It docks in the laptop's ExpressCard slot when not in use, and recharges from there too.

These are the kind of design additions that typically grace laptops in the £1000+ category, and it'll be hard to resist bragging about them when you show off your new machine.