HP Pavilion dv4

Full Review

A mainstream laptop needs to be a bit of a jack of all trade—and master of most of them. That's exactly what our winner does pretty well. In fact, all the laptops we compared in this category had a close tussle to the finish. The Dell Studio XPS 13 outclassed everyone with its performance; Lenovo Ideapad Y430 is best in terms of build quality; Acer's Aspire Timeline 4810T the most inexpensive and lightweight. But in terms of overall appeal, performance, features, and price, the HP Pavilion dv4 is the undisputed winner.

It is a very pretty laptop, sporting a metallic finish keyboard and palmrest, and an attractive screen cover with an illuminated HP logo. And it also has solid build quality. Between the keyboard and the hinge, there's a set of LED-powered touch sensitive multimedia buttons which are hard to see when the laptop is off, but light up when powered on. The keyboard is a beauty to type on, and so is the touchpad—it comes with a nifty on-off toggle button. The 14-inch screen displays 1280x800 screen resolution.

The innards are well looked after as well, there's an Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 2-GHz processor, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, 320GB hard drive, GeForce 9200M GS: decent specs. It also comes with a unique feature set: an HDMI, eSATA and a TV tuner combo—no other laptop comes with all three in our Top 5 Mainstream Laptops. As a result, the HP Pavilion dv4's multimedia potential sky rockets above the rest. Its onboard Altec Lansing speakers are also better in terms of audio playback in comparison to the rest. Quite frankly, we were impressed with the Pavilion dv4's multimedia and gaming performance: watching movies was a nice experience, and so was gaming to some extent. If you have Rs. 52,000 stashed somewhere, and you need a laptop for decent gaming and multimedia usage, look no further than the HP Pavilion dv4.

Bottom Line

A stylish, elegant laptop, the HP Pavilion dv4 sets the pace for the rest of the pack. It delivers decent all-round performance, unmatched feature set, and an attractive price makes the Pavilion dv4 a deserving winner.