The 12-cell battery will get you through a day's worth of classes or meetings, but you're likely to return home with a sore shoulder. With its huge battery, the 14-inch Pavilion dv4-1465dx tips the scales at 5.9 pounds. The 14-inch Toshiba Satellite E105-S1602 weighs in at a more reasonable 5.1 pounds, and the 14-inch Dell Studio S1440-022B shuns an optical drive and weighs only 4.7 pounds. Further, the Pavilion's battery protrudes about an inch below the bottom of the system but doesn't run the whole length (only about three-quarters) so when the laptop is resting on your thighs, it lists to the left. When seated at a desk or table, however, the battery provides a comfortable angle for typing.As with past Pavilion laptops, the glossy finish on the dv4's touch pad improves the overall design of the laptop, lending it yet another chrome accent, but most laptop touch pads feature matte finish material, which allows your finger to move across the surface with little friction. The glossy finish here feels grabby. You also leave a record of recent cursor movements on the touch pad in the form of a swirl of fingerprints and smudges. The touch pad is also very narrow, measuring only 1.5 inches tall by 3 inches wide. In the plus column for the touch pad are the wide and quiet mouse buttons below it, the vertical scroll area along its right edge, and a tiny on/off button above it.
Unlike the odd dimensions of the touch pad, the keyboard looks and feels like a natural fit on the Pavilion dv4's 14-inch chassis. The keys have a glossy finish that helps the overall look but detracts from the actual typing experience somewhat. The keys felt a bit too slick, though they do feature good travel and are very quiet. We prefer the keyboard on the Dell Studio S1440-022B. Touch-sensitive buttons for mute and Wi-Fi sit above the keyboard, plus a volume control that we wish was more responsive. Media transport buttons that resided here on previous Special Edition Pavilions have been moved to the Function keys.
As opposed the Studio S1440's wide 16:9 aspect ratio display and its 1,366x768-pixel native resolution, the features the more traditional laptop 16:10 aspect ratio with a 1,280x800-pixel resolution. It provides a less cinematic feel (movies will leave a letterbox), but the additional horizontal lines are appreciated when scrolling down long Web pages and Word docs. The HP's screen features a glossy coating, which helps colors pop when viewing photos and movies but also is a fairly egregious offending in terms of producing glare and distracting reflections.
The Pavilion's Altec Lansing stereo speakers are adequate, but they can't match the integrated speakers on the Dell Studio S1440, which produced a better sound: louder and clearer at max volume. The Pavilion dv4's audio output will suffice for movie dialogue and effects, but you'll want to use the headphone jacks (there are two) for music.
The Pavilion dv4-1465dx provides a decent selection of ports, including HDMI, eSATA, and two headphone jacks, but the Dell Studio S1440 provides those plus DisplayPort and FireWire connections. The lack of 802.11n Wi-Fi is a curious omission; most mainstream laptops offer this faster wireless connection. In the plus column, the laptop includes a small IR remote for controlling the action in Media Center; when not in use, it can be stowed in the ExpressCard slot.
As a member of Best Buy's Next Class program, the Pavilion dv4-1465dx includes a useful software bundle. Inside the box, you'll find a full copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 and 12 months of virus protection by way of Norton Internet Security 2009. Dell must have been a tougher negotiator with Norton; its Next Class program member, the Dell Studio S1440, offers 15 months of virus protection.On CNET Labs application benchmarks, the HP Pavilion dv4-1465d turned in a good showing, finishing among the leaders. None of its test scores stand out, which isn't surprising when you see it features a configuration similar to the other systems: Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 processor, 4GB of memory, a 5400rpm hard drive, and integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics.Where the HP Pavilion dv4-1465dx stands out is with battery life, and it had better since it requires you to lug around a mammoth 12-cell battery. The laptop ran for an impressive five hours and 31 minutes on CNET Labs' demanding video playback battery drain test. You can expect even longer performance under more typical Windows use where you aren't taxing the system by playing a video. While its battery life is unquestionably impressive, the trimmer 13-inch Pavilion dv3-2155dx and the lightweight Dell Studio S1440 come close, within almost an hour of the dv4-1465dx's battery life.
Moixa Energy USBCell AA batteries are practical for an on-the-go gadget addict. These attractive, compact batteries resemble other nickel metal hydride AAs, except for a bright green cap covering the USB plug. Instead of tossing them in the trash or nestling them into a recharging unit when out of juice, you can pop these into a USB port on any laptop or other USB device.The USBCell design is excellent and feels sturdy. When opened, the cap reveals a pair of tensile cords attaching it to the battery. We pulled and pulled, but couldn't break them.The batteries' LEDs light up around the base while inside a USB port, and flash slowly some 20 minutes later when the battery warms up to a 90 percent charge. The light turns off when the AAs are ready for use.Unfortunately, depending on how close your USB ports are to each other, you might not be able to plug in two or more USBCell batteries side by side at the same time. That's a major flaw, perhaps, if your laptop only features two side-by-side USB ports and you lack a third-party recharging kit.
USBCell AAs can replace comparable batteries altogether, especially if you have USB ports at the ready. But we wouldn't throw away standard batteries. Instead, we found it useful to carry both the USBCell batteries in addition to a pack of rechargeable NiMHs.Luckily, USBCells also fit into standard AA battery chargers. That could take up to 7 hours to recharge in a 250-milliamp charger. The vendor doesn't recommend 2-hour, 600-milliamp chargers.
Our rechargeable Duracell NiMH AAs were rated to store 2,300-milliamp hours, eclipsing the 1,300-milliamp hours of the USBCell equivalent. We found that a pair of fully charged USBCells lasted in a Canon point-and-shoot camera after shooting close to 600 pictures, while the Duracells lasted for more than 1,000 shots. In a small Flip video camera, the USBCells lasted for several hours of footage before needing more juice (we didn't measure the life of the other AAs in this device for contrast). USBCell batteries are meant to last 500 cycles, or several hundred charges.
The Toshiba Satellite E105-S1602 uses the same chassis as last year's Satellite E105-S1402, which is to say it's a departure from the standard Satellite styling. The boxy shape looks very different from the sloped, angled edges found on other Satellite laptops; the straight, vertical edges bring to mind the shape of an Apple MacBook. The E105 chassis is draped in a silver--almost pewter--color with Toshiba's Fusion finish, a pleasing, subtle pattern of pin stripes and curved lines on the lid, keyboard deck, screen bezel, and touch pad.The keyboard is exceedingly comfortable--akin to the quality found with a ThinkPad keyboard. There's little of the flex that can be found on some keyboards, and the keys offer good travel along with backlighting, a tenet of Best Buy's Blue Label program. The strip of illuminated, touch-sensitive media control buttons to the right of the keyboard, however, means that some of the keys are shorter than you'd expect from a keyboard on a 14-inch laptop, particularly the space bar and right Ctrl key in the bottom row. And on more than one occasion, we found the volume mysteriously decreasing until we discovered our pinky finger had come to rest on the volume-down button at the bottom of the vertical strip of media control keys. We'd prefer that strip of keys run horizontally above the keyboard.
We have no complaints, however, about the touch pad. Toshiba's Fusion finish pattern runs uninterrupted across the touch pad, but while the rest of the laptop features a glossy finish, the touch pad has a matte finish for a comfortable mousing experience. Many laptops, HP's Pavilions being prime examples, have a glossy touch pad, which doesn't provide the best feel when dragging your finger across its surface. Below the touch pad, two wide but squat mouse buttons flank an always appreciated fingerprint reader.The laptop's 14.1-inch screen features a 1,280x800 native resolution. The screen has a glossy finish, but it's far from the worst offender in terms of producing glare and reflections. It also offers only merely average image quality. During movie playback, we saw some color banding. Below average is the audio output from the two stereo speakers located on either side of the laptop's front edge. Movies and music sounded muddled and tinny. At maximum volume, we had to lean in close and still could barely make out Sam Elliott's intro to The Big Lebowski. Integrated speakers are limited by their nature, but the E105-S1602's two speakers failed to meet even our low expectations.
Above the screen sit a Webcam and built-in microphone for video chats. Below are two sturdy hinges that keep the screen firmly rooted in place.
The Satellite E105 provides an average allotment of connections, serving up three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, and a multiformat media card reader. An eSATA connection is becoming a more frequent addition to laptops, and one of the E105's USB ports doubles as an eSATA port for faster data transfer times to external hard drives with this interface. You won't find FireWire, which is found on less and less laptops these days, nor will you find a ExpressCard slot. The most surprising inclusion here is an FM radio jack; Toshiba includes a small FM antenna in the box should you want to listen to the radio over the airwaves instead of streaming it over the Internet.The retail-only Satellite E105-S1602 is available in a single fixed configuration, based on Intel's Centrino 2 platform. It features the 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo P7350 processor, which is basically the same chip as the Core 2 Duo P8400 found in last year's E105 model. The only real difference between the two processors is clock speed: the P7350 is clocked at 2.0GHz, and the P8400 runs at 2.26GHz. Though it trims $300 off the price of its predecessor, the E105-S1602 features a larger hard drive, replacing the 320GB unit with a 500GB drive.
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