THE AX EFFECT FROM HP

The DV2-1003AX is a beauty. It looks slim and sleek, but is built sturdy too. The cover panel is glossy black, and needless to say, it tends to attract fingerprints. You realise that HP has not compromised on the build quality while concentrating on the looks.
HP manages to achieve the remarkable 'slimness' since the laptop has no optical drive. However, HP has included an external DVD writer (LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD RW with double layer support) in the package. It would have been better had HP included a carry bag as carrying a separate optical drive can be a pain. The user could also forget to pick it up if he is in a hurry.

The 1003AX is powered by an AMD Athlon Neo MV 40 16. GHz, 512 MB L2 Cache, 1600 MHz FSB) processor, which was AMD's response to Intel's Atom. While a single core processor is enough for small netbooks, HP could have gone for a more powerful processor, especially as it prefers to categorise it as an 'entertainment notebook PC'. This also explains the bundling of the external optical drive. The laptop comes with a generous 320 GB hard drive.
The notebook has three USB ports, a HDMI connector, one VGA, one RJ-45 ethernet connector, a headphone socket and a mic-in socket. There is a memory card slot, a standard in almost all laptops, including netbooks.

We spent some time hunting for the power switch and discovered it on the right side. The WiFi switch is right next to it.

The 12.1-inch diagonal WXGA high-definition LED screen is glossy, nice and bright and has no cause for complaints. The keyboard with slightly curved keys is a pleasure to work with. Graphics have become an integral part of almost all notebooks. This is no exception, but thankfully, it is subdued.

HP has gone in for Windows Vista Home Premium as if to emphasise that this is not a netbook. Despite the 2GB RAM, the 1003AX was sluggish, which we feel could be because of the single core processor. The laptop supports up to 4 GB of memory.

Inclusion of an ATI Mobility Radeon HD Premium Graphics card along with 512 MB dedicated memory manages to provide a pretty decent movie playback capability.
The speakers are from Altec Lansing and are located below the laptop. Could this be the reason for the rather mute sound quality despite featuring good brand speakers? There is an additional speaker on the left that compensated the main speakers, but lack of a similar speaker on the right affected tracks with stereophonic sounds.

The trackpad looks glossy and slippery, but we managed to use it quite easily as we quickly got used to it.

The 6-cell lithium-ion battery lasted a little under 3 hours initially with the WiFi and Internet on. Turning off the WiFi improved the battery performance, but using the external optical drive brought it back to square one. Again we had to tweak the power settings to improve the performance. We also felt the heat was slightly on the higher side.

To sum it up, the DV2-1003AX is a nice sleek laptop you would love to have and carry around, but you will have to remember to take the external optical drive every time. The performance is slightly sluggish because of the combination of the resource-hungry Windows Vista and single core processor. Movie playback and games are good, thanks to a decent graphics card and dedicated memory.

It's better when compared to a netbook. Considering the size, which is slightly larger than a netbook, the price is decent.

Ratings:

Aesthetics and design : 5/ 5

User Interface : 4/ 5

Features : 4/ 5

Value for money: 4/ 5

Text & Images: Business Line - Smartbuy

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