The HP Pavilion G6-2248CA ($449.99), available in Canada, is a good, not great, buy for the price. It's a full-featured 15.6-inch laptop for under $475. It has decent battery life, but otherwise has mediocre performance numbers. It's designed to be a workhorse alternative to the inexpensive tablets of the world. It's not a perfect value PC, considering its competition, but for the price you may be able to overlook the occasional wait for the PC to finish the tasks you're performing.
Design and Features
The G6-2248CA is pretty standard looking. It's designed to be appeal to most of the population, so it has basic looks with a glossy black visage. The 15.6-inch screen dictates the size of the chassis, which is 3.6 by 37.6 by 24.4 cm (HWD), and the system weighs about five and a half pounds. It's a little heavy compared to the ultrabooks you see promoted by Intel, but it's certainly portable enough for the home or college campus. The G6-2248CA comes with a chiclet-style keyboard with full numeric keypad, which may come in handy if you're entering a lot of numbers, like in actuarial or engineering programs. The keyboard isn't backlit, but that's okay since the system is so inexpensive.
The G6-2248CA has a textured surface on its trackpad, which can help keep it from feeling tacky if you use the system while munching on cheese puffs, for example. The multi-touch trackpad supports Windows 8 gestures like bringing up the charms bar. The screen supports 1,366-by-768 native resolution, sufficient for 720p HD, though 1080p HD will have to be scaled down for the screen. The system was certainly powerful enough to view both types of HD video from online sources.
The system has a decent amount of connectivity, with two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, VGA, Ethernet, and HDMI. Be careful with the USB ports, as all of them are black. USB 3.0 ports are more commonly molded in blue plastic on other systems to help you tell them apart from the slower USB 2.0 ports. The system also has a SD card reader and DVD burner. The DVD contributes to the thickness of the system, but may be important for casual users that still want to use older programs found on DVDs or CDs. The G6-2248CA comes with 6GB of memory and a 750GB hard drive. The 6GB is a good amount, and more memory lets you open more tabs simultaneously or multitask running several programs at once. In contrast, the more expensive Asus VivoBook X202E-BH91T-CB ($499.99) has to make do with 4GB of system memory, holding it back on some performance tests (see below).
The system comes with quite a few pieces of pre-loaded software, including Solitaire, Mahjong, HP Connected Photo (Snapfish), Kindle, HP+ (online store), Skype, Norton Studio (60 days trial subscription), Netflix, eBay, Microsoft Office Trial, HP connected music, and HP MyRoom (video conferencing). Most of these programs and applications are veiled ads for their respective services, but they can be convenient if you already use them in your day-to-day life. Though it's quite a lot of extra stuff, the 750GB hard drive still has plenty of space for all your music, photos, and videos. The G6-2284 comes with a one-year warranty.
Performance
The Pavilion G6-2248CA comes with an AMD A4-4300M processor with integrated AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics. These components translate into decent, if uninspiring performance on our benchmark tests. The G6-2248CA is certainly slower than Core i3-powered systems like the Lenovo IdeadPad N581 ($499) or the higher end AMD A8-4500M-powered HP Pavilion M6-1148CA ($599.99) on our Handbrake and Photoshop multimedia tests. The situation is much the same with the day-to-day PCMark7 test, at least when you compare the G6-2248CA to the Lenovo N581. That said, the G6-2248C is still faster that the Pentium processor-powered Asus VivoBook X202E-BH91T-CB. The Pentium CPU keeps that Asus system at the back of the pack with almost excruciatingly long Handbrake and Photoshop test times.
The G6-2248CA excels at our battery rundown test, coming in at eleven minutes short of five hours (4:49). The Lenovo N581 comes close at 4:43, but all the others in this roundup come in and hour or two behind the G6-2248CA. Basically, this means that the G6-2248CA should last for a few hour-long classes and still manage to keep you system powered while you grab a cup of coffee in the study lounge. Battery life is one the G6-2248CA's few remarkable differentiators.
The HP Pavilion G6-2248CA is a decent, if unexciting value laptop. It's got the battery power to last you through most of a school day, plus its price tag won't leave you gasping for air. Take a look at the system if you really need to save money over all other concerns, but note that buying a system with extra performance oomph will cost a bit more (about $50 more).
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the HP Pavilion G6-2248CA with several other laptops side by side.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/_hJr_SF2hLI/0,2817,2418818,00.asp
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