Three years ago, I received an HP Pavilion dv8000 for my birthday. I’d
had other laptops before at various times; this one was by far the
fanciest of the bunch. It had been a few years since my last laptop, and
I had grown accustomed to using a desktop, but I fell back into the
laptop groove immediately. The only thing that took a little getting
used to was the touch pad instead of the mouse. The range of motion
isn’t quite as wide as it would be with a mouse, but I quickly adjusted,
as evidenced by the large area in the center of the touch pad where the
color has been worn away. I’ve never used a mouse with it because my
laptop is almost always literally in my lap, where a mouse wouldn’t do
me much good.
The keys are about half as deep as the ones on
our desktop. This makes typing quicker and quieter. Meanwhile, they are
of comfortable size, perfect for long stretches of typing; my mom has a
laptop about half the size of mine, and typing on her computer is much
slower going for me. My HP Pavilion allows me a lot of speed in
composition. Word processing and Internet navigation are the two main
things I use my computer for, and it performs well in both of those
areas, at least most of the time. I get frustrated by the
incompatibility among various word processing programs, and different
versions of the same program, but that’s really not the computer’s
fault.
For the past couple of years, I have had a digital camera,
so I’ve begun storing quite a few pictures on my laptop. I have upwards
of 7000 photos saved, and my computer is in no danger of running out of
space. Of course, my documents take up far less room than the pictures,
so I’m in good shape spacewise. I’ve typed hundreds of documents on
here and saved them with no difficulty, and on those occasions when my
computer does freeze up while I’m working on something, most of the data
can usually be restored.
Internet navigation has worked very
well for me, aside from some occasional connection problems. Most of the
time, it takes seconds to hop from site to site, which is especially
handy when I am answering questions for ChaCha, a mobile answering
service. Working as a guide there requires downloading the ChaCha Tool
Bar, and installing that was a very quick and easy process for me. I am
always able to watch videos on YouTube and take advantage of the Instant
Viewing on Netflix with few hiccups. Same goes for uploading
photographs on Facebook.
On the downside, I have had to take
my computer in for repairs a few times. It seems rather vulnerable. I’ve
replaced various aspects of the laptop, and at the moment I am
operating without a working USB port or sound of any kind. Because of
the other computers in my house, I don’t really miss these capabilities
much, but if I were on my own I would definitely mind. I can’t really
say if the problems I have had are indicative of a flimsy computer, or
if I’m just very hard on mine. I use it a lot. The biggest issue
inherent with my laptop is the power cord, which breaks easily. I’ve had
to replace it several times; the design seems to be inherently
impractical.
Despite a few issues, I’ve loved my HP Pavilion
and hope to get much more use out of it in the years to come. I’m not
very technically oriented, so I don’t know how it all works; I just know
that when my computer is cooperating with me, I am a happy camper.
While I wish the company would reconsider this model’s power cord
design, for the most part, the HP Pavilion dv8000 is the perfect machine
for me.
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