Unpacking the boxUnpacking the box

I was happy with my older, four-year-old laptop, at first anyway, as it was decent at the time. But in recent years it was just underpowered for what I wanted to do with it. Not to mention it was one of those desktop-replacement types that is big and weighs a ton (or close to it). I wanted more portability and more power.

Short summary: the HP G60-230CA has made my portable computing enjoyable again.

The CA bit indicates this is a Canadian version. There is a similar US version with, of course, the US suffix.

The specs are:

  • Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (32 bit)
  • 3GB Memory
  • 250GB Hard Drive
  • Pentium Dual-Core T4200
  • 16-inch Widescreen Display
  • HP Webcam
  • SuperMulti DVD+-RW Lightscribe Drive
  • 5-in-1 Media Card Reader

The specs are fairly good – not the most high-end, but good. I wanted to balance features against size and price, and I think it worked out well.

Laptop lid upLaptop lid up

This is a widescreen model, with a diagonal of 16 inches. A nice size, not too small, not too big. The screen has a resolution of 1366 x 768 (16:9 ratio). The screen is the glossy reflective type, so the laptop needs to be positioned with lighting in mind to avoid reflections or glare.

When the laptop is open, the speakers are below the screen and above the keyboard, and take up the full length of the laptop. There are just two buttons there, nice and simple: power and wi-fi. On the whole, the system is black. The keyboard and surrounding area have a silvery finish. The lid has a shiny black finish, and attracts dust and fingerprints.

Laptop keyboardLaptop keyboard

The keyboard looks to be near full size, and feels good when typing. It doesn’t flex much, if at all. Something I like is the numeric keypad at the right end of the keyboard – a nice feature, and the first time I’ve seen it on a laptop. It was one of the selling features for me, and has been useful several times already.

One thing I do not like about the keyboard is that it has been slightly reconfigured. The left shift key is half the normal size, and shares the space it normally gets with a pipe (|) and backslash (\) key. This is particularly strange as the same key is also next to the return key. I suspect it is due to the keyboard being a dual language setup, English and French (considering that this laptop version is targeted for the Canadian market). In any case, when I try to hit the left shift key, I sometimes get the extra pipe/backslash key by mistake. An annoyance, but one I can live with.

The operating system shipped with the laptop is Vista Home Premium with SP1. I had not used Vista for any real time before, just hadn’t had the opportunity. Despite all the negative PR around Vista since it was released, I find it works well for me. I have not had any real issues, other than having to learn what was changed from Windows XP. But that’s not the point here. The point is, Vista works well on this laptop.

Performance was a big concern for me. My old laptop was decent for the specs, four years ago. But it was barely usable with current software in recent times, which was a big motivator in looking at newer systems. This laptop has good specs for the price point, and handles my selection of applications without any issues. These include Microsoft Office and Visual Studio (2005 and 2008), Adobe CS3, and a handful of games. Some of these did not have a chance on the older laptop, and others were painfully slow.

Speaking of games, I will say that this is not really a gaming system. It has no discrete video card, and uses shared memory, which comes off the top of the system memory listed in the specs. That said, it does handle some of my choices fairly well, including Civilization 3 and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and 4.

The laptop is well-equipped for multimedia uses. Such features include a five-in-one memory card reader, for unloading photos from my digital camera, the nice screen, decent speakers (sounds pretty good to me anyway) and a built-in web camera. There is some included software to use the webcam, and I tested it out. The output is a little grainy, but certainly usable.

So, to summarize, this is a very nice laptop. The screen space it provides, along with the other specs, make this system a good value for what it costs. The keyboard bugs me a little as mentioned above, but it’s not a huge issue. Other than that, I am quite happy with this laptop.