A Product Review: HP Pavilion PC Notebook Dv5020us

Last year my old Gateway tabletop pc, with the huge tower, slowly ground to a halt and finally died, leaving me with no computer of my own until I was able to purchase my new toy. It is an HP Pavilion Notebook PC, Model dv 5020us, and for me it is such an improvement over the old desktop version.

For the tech info nuts, it comes with the following features: 80GB hard drive, 1024 MB system memory, DVD R/RW and CD RW combo drive with Double Layer support, AMD Turion 64 Mobile Processor ML-32 with Power Now! Technology (1.8 GHz, 5.12 KB L2 cache, up to 1800MHz system bus), 54g 802, 11b/g wireless LAN with 125HSM/ SpeedBooster support and HP QuickPlay launches music and movies at the press of a button.

The first thing I was pleased about was the fact that my new HP Pavilion Laptop took only a very short time to get up and running and on the internet. This was a vast improvement over my old Gateway, which took the better part of a day to get loaded and up and running. It also took three people to figure it all out. I know part of that is improved technology that has come into play, since new models outdate older ones in very short time periods and my old Gateway was 8 years behind the times.

It served it's purpose well though, until it died on me, and their support team always helped me, even though it sometimes took hours and hours to fix small problems. They never really explained what was wrong each time, which still kept me feeling like a dunderhead and helpless, but they did take the time to verbally walk me through each step, every time. I actually retained some of it, but for the basic user, like I am, what is hidden behind the scenes running a computer is very detailed and amazing. It is a constant learning experience.

It took awhile to get used to a laptop, as this was my first experience with one. The placement of the keyboard, set back from the mouse made my hands and forearms arms ache for awhile, until they got used to the different layout.

The mouse pad set up was another thing that took getting used to. I ended up buying a small plug in mouse to use, but I'm comfortable with the little mouse pad too now, if I have to use that instead.