HP Pavilion g4: Cheap entertainment notebook

If your needs revolve around surfing the web, checking mail, entertainment, office tasks, the HP Pavilion g4 can fully meet your needs.

The HP Pavilion g4's price of $ 379 (about 7.9 million) can keep you looking. The laptop using AMD chip A4-3300M is not a high-performance machine but at a low price, it is quite suitable for users who only need to surf the web, browse email or watch entertainment programs that do not require configuration. high picture.

Design

Pavilion g4 has a compact, minimalist design. There are not many decorative patterns in addition to the HP logo on the corner of the machine. Although it is made of plastic, the gloss of the machine still feels strong. However you should remember it saves fingerprints.

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When you open the device, you will notice the gray design on the cover. Both the screen and deck are framed in black, though the screen looks more boring with matte black plastic.

It weighs 2.08 kg and measures 13.4 x 9.1 inches, 3.55 cm thick but feels light compared to other laptops of the same size (eg Lenovo IdeaPad V470 size 13.4 x 9.2 inches and has the same weight). Perfectly suited for travelers.

Heat

Pavilion g4 is quite cool through testing. After watching videos with a length of 15 minutes, the touchpad recorded a temperature of 25.5 degrees Celsius, the keyboard had a temperature of 28.8 degrees Celsius. The laptop temperature fell to below 35 degrees Celsius with similar tests usually considered cool. Therefore, the Pavilion g4 is good for this point.

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However, when performing many tasks on the machine, especially surfing the web, scanning the entire system and at the same time watching videos, the machine starts to make a loud sound.

Keyboard and touchpad

The Pavilion g4 keyboard is not entirely a Chiclet keyboard, but its black flat keys are designed with a square and the keys are arranged equally. Keyboard for great typing experience. Feedback on good keys and user's fingertips can easily control the keys.

HP reverses the original function key when pressing the key to give you quick access to volume, brightness, music and movie controls (pause, turn on, .)

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The device's 3.3 x 1.7-inch touchpad provides enough friction to move the cursor accurately. Touchpad handles a series of multi-touch gestures from zoom with pinch of fingers, sweeping 3 fingers quite smoothly. The other touch gestures you have to activate in the touchpad software.

HP offers a great touch option: a concave button in the upper left corner of the touchpad allows to turn on and off the multi-point gesture function.

Screen and sound

The Pavilion G4 uses a 14-inch LED-backlit screen with a standard resolution of 1366 x 768. The screen displays video and images are very bright, but in contrast, it's the exact opposite.

When testing the 1080p video, the brightness of the screen turned black at night into a muddy gray, although the scene in the movie was 6 pm.

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Although the colors are not real, the camera's viewing angle is extremely wide. Whether viewed from 90 degrees from the right or left, the color on the screen is not lost. However, because the panel is glossy and not really bright, the machine is dazzling in places where there is too much light coming in.

Altec Lansing stereo speakers of the G4 are arranged in front of the machine and SRS Labs' high-end audio technology provides excellent, accurate sound for a netbook at a low price. The Premium Sound utility allows you to adjust treble and bass to get the best experience.

Port and webcam

Most of the g4's ports are located on the left, including VGA, Ethernet, 1 HDMI port, SD card slot, 2 USB ports, headphone and jack. On the left is an additional USB port, Kensington security card and SuperMulti Drive to burn and play DVDs and CDs.

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Connection ports.

Pavilion g4 is equipped with a 0.3 MP webcam that allows to capture both video and still images. When testing the camera using both natural sunlight by the window and fluorescent lights in the office, the image is grainy and lacks detail.

When making a video call with Skype, photos received are not distorted, sound is good, but not superior.

Performance

With the AMD Dual-Core A4-3300M APU processor at 1.9 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, the HP Pavilion g4 can allow common tasks to be smooth, as long as you don't perform too many tasks same time.

When opening about 10 cards in IE browser, running Norton Internet Security anti-virus program, playing video, the device has lag, especially with video.

HP Pavilion G4 reached 3,828 on PCMark Vantage, quite poorly compared to the average score of the current light and thin notebooks (5891 points).

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Pavilion g4 hard drives have a capacity of 3320 GB 5400 revolutions per minute. In testing, it took 52 seconds to boot with Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, 13 seconds faster than the average boot time of the same netbook.

However, when testing the data transfer rate, it took 4 minutes 43 seconds to copy a 4,97 GB capacity file, which is about 19.4 MB / second, lower than the same netbook speed (reached 27 MB / sec).

Graphics

When testing the AMD Radeon HD 6480G graphics card with the 3DMark06 benchmark, the Pavilion g4 scored 3,458 points, lost to Pavilion dm4t (3,466 points), Lenovo V470 (3,944 points), the two machines using Intel HD 3000 graphics cards.

Poor graphics performance continues to be proven when testing World of Warcraft. Pavilion g4 is only 36 frames per second with an original resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. Of course, you can still play games on the computer, but compared to the average frame rate of the same machines (80 frames per second), obviously Pavilion g4 is far below this.

Battery life

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You should not expect the good battery life of a cheap notebook. The same goes for g4. The device gives 4 hours of battery life 23 minutes. By comparison, the Lenovo V470 provides 4 hours of 56 minutes of battery life per charge, which is better than g4. Meanwhile, the HP Pavilion dm4t has an impressive battery life of about 7 hours.

Configuration

When buying machines through BestBuy retail system, customers only pay 379 USD. If purchased from other retail websites, HP sells machines for $ 479 with Inte chips; Core i3-370M, 4 GB of RAM and 500 GB hard drive. Another configuration for you to choose from is the Core i3 chip, 640 GB hard drive and 6 GB of RAM sold by HP for $ 654.

Software

HP comes with a lot of HP software including HP Support Assistant to assist you when needed, HP Recovery Manager helps restore media to your device, HP Setup Manager to back up documents.

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Launch Box allows you to group frequently used applications in the folder and arrange it in the taskbar. Applications are also grouped by function in the Start bar, quite smart and convenient. When the device is off, you can press F5 to run HP QuickWeb - an immediate operating environment. Once you launch this application, you can instantly access frequently used Internet applications such as Skype or widgets. Compared to 52 seconds of booting from Windows 7, HP QuickWeb is loaded super fast with 30 seconds.

The device is preinstalled with Norton Internet Security 2012 for 60 days trial, Microsoft Office Starter 2010 and some other photo and music software.

Conclude

If your needs revolve around surfing the web, checking mail, entertainment, office tasks, the HP Pavilion g4 can fully meet your needs. With an attractive design, wide keyboard, stereo speakers. If you want a better battery life, you might consider choosing Pavilion dm4t, but you should compare the price between the two.

Strength

- Wonderful sound

- Wide viewing angle

- Attractive design

- Wide keyboard

Weakness

- Dishonest colors