HP Pavilion G7-1033cl

HP Pavilion G7-1033cl

Jan 13

Launched in the first quarter of last year, the HP Pavilion G7-1033cl features a sleek glossy lid and leaves the impression of an overall clean design. It is wearing a light gray plastic finish that has a metallic sheen on it which looks quite attractive. Even though it has a glossy surface, it manages to do a good job at keeping away fingerprints, while the two-tone color scheme of the interior looks nice.

The laptop measures 1.45 x 16.25 x 10.7 inches (HWD) and tips the scales at 6.1 pounds. It comes with a generous touchpad that has been molded seamlessly into the palm rest and you can distinguish it thanks to a textured pattern consisting of raised dots. The touchpad has classic left and right mouse buttons and the multitouch gestures work as advertized.

HP fitted this model with a full-size keyboard that has square-shaped keys that are raised, managing to provide a typing experience which is somewhat similar to that of a chiclet-style keyboard. Those of you who type in a lot of numbers will certainly appreciate the full-sized numeric pad located on the right side.

This HP Pavilion G7-1033cl has a large 17.3-inch widescreen display that has a native resolution of 1,600 x 900 pixels. The model features two stereo Altec Lansing speakers and comes with the SRS Premium Sound software. The sound coming out of these speakers is above the average in this segment, but if you turn the volume too high it will distort the sound.

At the heart of the laptop is a first generation Intel Core i3-380M processor and 4GB of DDR3 RAM which allows the system to score 5,590 points in PCMark Vantage. This budget notebook has a 500GB hard drive spinning at 5,400 rpm and comes with a standard DVD burner. Other than that, it has three USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, VGA out, multi-format card reader and an HDMI port for connecting the laptop to a big screen HDTV.

On that hard drive you will find a lot of pre-loaded software, including Microsoft Office 2010 Starter, Skype, TurboTax, Quicken, QuickBooks (trial), LoJack laptop location, a dedicated eBay link on the desktop, HP Movie Store, HP PictureMover and a bunch of games from WildTangent.

HP has equipped this G7 model with a 6-cell 47Wh battery that manages to last a little over 4 hours during a MobileMark test. This means that the model lasts longer than the Lenovo G560-0679AKU (3:49) but considerably less than the Acer AS5742-6475 that can survive during the same test for approximately five hours. The latter has just about the same hardware specifications as the HP model and it is fitted with an identical 48Wh battery.

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