Hewlett Packard DV6000z

AMD Turion 64X2 TL-64 (2.2 GHz/512KB) Imprint Finish, 5-in-1 card reader, Firewire, NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 w/webcam 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 250 GB 5400 RPM SA

I purchased the HP DV6000z as my first Windows Vista computer. I needed something inexpensive and portable with some juice under the hood. I purchased mine for $880.00 @ Best Buy after about 2 months of research. It's a good looking laptop, comfortable to work on and type on. The 15.4'' widescreen is nice with a resolution of 1280x800, but I wish it had a higher resolution. The case of the laptop is a hybrid of different patterned plastics with a gloss that shows fingerprints very easily. The touch pad is sensitive, positioned nicely and has an up/down scroll feature. Being that it's a media notebook, it has an array of feather touch control above the keyboard for volume, music playback, etc. It comes with 3 USB power, 2 of which are very close to palm rests, Modem, Network connections and a 8x DVD+/-R/W. One thing I do not like is that the switch to turn the wireless on/off is location on the front of the laptop and I have on a number of occasions, hit the switch and lost connection w/o knowing it at first. Battery life is pretty good for surfing the web, word processing, but don't expect more then 2 hours on a DVD. just make sure the wireless is off. The major selling points for me was the hardware. The system has an AMD processor running at 2.0 ghz (this was before the dual core movement), 1 gb (NOT ENOUGH), 120 GB hard drive and a 64 MB NVidia GeForce graphics card. I paid a few $ more for the extras because Vista is a notorious system hog and a non-integrated video card gives much better performance. Out of the box, the experience was so-so. the 1GB of RAM was not enough to run Vista with great speed. Yes, the computer worked great, but it was quite slow. HP lived up to it's reputation by including 2 dozen useless trialware programs, all of which took me 2 hours to remove. DVD playback is great, although the audio leaves a lot to be desired. Do not be fooled by the Altec Lansing name affixed to the speaker grilles. Aside from upgrading the RAM to a maximum of 2 GB, the computer has operated w/o a problem for over a year. I am a happy 1st time HP customer.