The HP Pavilion DV7-4045ea promotes itself on entertainment and heavy use. Shunning easy portability for PC-like performance, it’s the latest offering in HP’s multimedia notebook range.
The notebook looks pretty sleek, with a brushed aluminium external finish and an engraved design. It also comes with a built-in web cam, a backlit keyboard and a fingerprint reader for increased security. The touchpad is a little bit finicky to use, however, and can take a bit of getting used to.
With a 17-inch screen and a weight of 3.7kg, it’s not something you can take with you wherever you go, but that said, the focus here is on multimedia, as opposed to portability.
It comes with a huge variety of HP-based programs, such as the HP MediaSmart Suite for managing and editing your media, HP Games Console for gaming, the HP Support Assistant for optimising performance and HP Quick Web, which provides quick access to the internet without the need to boot up Windows.
It also includes Corel VideoStudio and Corel PaintshopPro for video and photo editing.
HP MediaSmart Web Cam in particular, comes with a large amount of features. It offers numerous recording modes for the web cam, such as motion detection recording, continuous recording and time lapse recording.
You can draw on the image or apply animations that follow your head around, too. They’re not 100pc accurate, but they’re still good fun.
HP Pavilion DV7-4045ea software
While there’s a huge selection of software, a lot of users may find the amount to be a bit excessive. I’d personally find myself uninstalling a lot of these extra programs, either to save space, to install my own or simply because I wouldn’t use the half of them.
In regards to performance, it certainly is a heavy-duty laptop. It’s equipped with the AMD Phenom II Quad-Core Processor P920 at 1.6 GHz. It also has ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 Graphics, with 1 GB DDR3 dedicated memory.
Adding this to its support of DirectX 11, it’s proved to be pretty capable for gaming, handling Mass Effect 2 with little to no issue.
Performance-wise, it’s quite good and more than able of operating a number of heavy-duty programs at once. Intel may still have the upper hand in the processing world, but the AMD processor is perfectly fine for everyday use.
The 17-inch screen supports HD video and the notebook is equipped with BEATS sound system and an integrated sub woofer. This is where the notebook shines, making it a great piece of hardware for watching films at a high quality.
The notebook has a 500GB hard drive, and a generous amount of storage. Its battery lasted about four and a half hours for average use.
Overall, the HP Pavilion DV7-4045ea is a great notebook for multimedia purposes. It’s pretty well suited to individuals or families looking for a pure entertainment computer.
The HP Pavilion DV7-4045ea costs €1,039 and is available in PC World outlets in Liffey Valley, Carrickmines, the Jervis Centre, Galway and Cork.
