Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Entertainment PC (dv6207tx)

Our latest peek at HP's Pavilion Entertainment PC range is the HP dv6207tx, which runs Windows Vista Home Premium edition. The dv6207dx offers all the usual perks of the HP Pavilion Entertainment PC range, such as excellent Altec Lansing speakers, handy media controls and plenty of useful media-related tools.

With an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz T5200 CPU, 1GB of DDR2 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 graphics chip, this notebook can handle the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system well, including its Aero interface. We put it through WorldBench 6, our latest benchmarking software, to find out just how well it performs. WorldBench 6 is an application-based testing suite that determines how well a system will run under Vista. In WorldBench 6, the HP Pavilion Entertainment PC dv6207tx scored a total of 63. This places it in line with similar systems, such as the Toshiba Satellite A100 (PSAARA-055007).

This score doesn't typify an overly powerful system, but does indicate that it can handle basic tasks well. We found that it performed well in the Photoshop photo editing test and also in the office application tests, but didn't do so well in the Firefox 2 and multitasking tests. Overall, it outperformed the Toshiba Satellite A100 (PSAARA-055007) by a small amount in WorldBench 6. Disappointingly, the HP Pavilion Entertainment PC dv6207tx had issues in the same areas that we've seen from this range before. The 15.4in screen runs at a native resolution of 1280x800, but it has a fairly poor viewing angle, so it's a bit shabby when watching DVDs. This is a shame, especially because the Altec Lansing speakers in the dv6207tx are among the best quality you can get in a notebook and are great for watching movies. The other disappointment is the unit's battery life, which we tested by looping a DVD.

The DVD loop test is considered a worst-case as it requires the use of the speakers and optical drive, as well as the essential hardware, such as the CPU and RAM. In this test, the HP Pavilion Entertainment PC dv6207tx only lasted 61 minutes, which isn't even enough to finish a feature film. For a notebook with portable entertainment ambitions, this result is limiting. Although the louder than average speakers would have contributed greatly to the battery drain, it's still a shame that it couldn't last a bit longer.

Apart from its screen and less-impressive battery life, the HP Pavilion Entertainment PC dv6207tx offers some good features. It has a 5-in-1 media card reader that supports SD, MS, MS-Pro, MMC and xD cards; a LightScribe DVD-rewriter, which allows you to creatively label special DVD discs; and a 1.3-megapixel camera built into the bezel above the screen. Instead of just one headphone port, this unit offers two, for listening to music or watching a movie with a friend. The aforementioned speakers and the dedicated media controls (play/pause, skip, stop, mute and volume), which are located just above the keyboard, give this system good media functionality. Also useful in this field are the VGA and S-Video ports, which can be used to output video to a larger screen or a projector.

As well as the media card reader and the video ports, there are three USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port and an Express Card slot. If these connections won't suffice, you can also get a port-replicator, which plugs into a proprietary port on the side of the machine. For wired networking, the HP Pavilion Entertainment PC dv6207tx has a 56Kbps modem and a 10/100 Ethernet port. For unwired networking it offers Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g and Bluetooth 2.0.