HP Pavilion DV9410US 17" Laptop

HP Pavilion DV9410US 17" Laptop (AMD Turion 64 Processor TL56, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, Vista Premium)
The HP Pavilion dv9410 has been designed to provide you with advanced digital entertainment solutions, as well as fast and reliable mobile computing performance. Enjoy 3D gaming and video editing with the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 graphics card. Watch your favorite DVDs, or create one of your own, with the 8x LightScribe Super Multi DVD burner. Movies and games look amazing on the 17" WXGA+ High-Definition Brightview Widescreen LCD. Being a widescreen, its also great for your day-to-day applications. True side-by-side multi-tasking has never been easier. See below for what else the HP Pavilion dv9410 has to offer... 2 RAM Slots NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 with up to 287MB of shared memory (memory is taken from the main system's RAM) 160GB (5400RPM) HDD 8x Super Multi Double Layer DVD Burner with LightScribe labeling technology 17 WXGA+ High-Definition Brightview Widescreen Native Resolution - 1440 x 900 Ports - 10/100 Ethernet, 4 USB 2.0, 1 Firewire, 1 Headphone Out with SPDIF Digital Audio, 1 Microphone In, 1 VGA,&1 S-Video Out 802.11b/g Wi-Fi Support Webcam with Integrated Microphone 5-in-1 integrated Digital Media Reader - supports Secure Digital (SD), MultiMedia Cards (MMC), Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro,&xD Picture Cards 56k Fax Modem Altec Lansing Audio 1 ExpressCard/54 Slot (also supports ExpressCard/34) Unit Dimensions - 15.16 (l) x 11.65 (w) x 1.57 (h) Unit Weight - 7.8 lbs.

Customer Review: Good value and rock solid now, would buy another

Purchased in December 2007. Loved the bells and whistles of this laptop and the display.
The good news.......

In April HP support released a slew of software updates for this computer including a bios update. MS service pack 1 was also included.

After 6 hours of installing the updates the laptop runs flawless, faster and rock solid and great wireless range. I love it now. Awesome for DVD playback and spread sheets. It is now my primary computer.

Battery life can be improved in Vista setting tweaks to about 3 hours for video playback. Expect about 2 hours on normal usage.
Since then I have increased the operating speed by adding another Gig of memory (about $80.00) and replacing the hard drive with a larger faster 180 gig Sata 7200 rpm drive (about $120.00) and using the original drive in the second drive bay for video's and data. You will need a HP Sata drive caddy to install it (about $35.00). The mouse pad can be sticky due to perspiration.
The original bad news....

Initially had intermittent web-cam and external USB devices along with loss of audio and changing of display settings and freezing of video playback and system lockup. Returning from hibernation or sleep mode would crash the system or programs would crash it. Just about every problem others had stated.

HP support solution was to do a system reload which worked until you added a USB device or 3rd party software.

I worked around the problems by reinstalling drivers and not shutting the computer down defeating the purpose of a laptop.