HP dv6500t: A "Minivan" Notebook

Closing Thoughts

After playing with this notebook for the past several weeks, we end up with a few general impressions. First, you want to make sure you're getting an appropriate notebook for your intended use. As long as you're okay not playing games, you will generally be more than happy with the HP dv6500t. It performs pretty well and has a decent feature set. It doesn't top the performance charts in any of our tests, but it really doesn't need to. For the price, you get a relatively nice entry level/midrange notebook.

Price will likely be a major factor for a lot of people. The dv6500t can be had for as little as $950, but in the basic configuration you lose a lot of the features that make the laptop worthwhile. Memory gets cut down to 1GB, you don't get Microsoft Office, and you lose some of the extras like the webcam and fingerprint scanner. Most users will be better off spending $1400-$1500, which allows you to upgrade the memory, the operating system, the hard drive, and either the graphics card or the CPU. Unfortunately, you're still stuck with the display, and that's one of the areas we personally would really like to upgrade. We're not saying that it needs one of the best quality laptop LCDs available, but something a little better perhaps with a resolution of 1440x900 or 1680x1050 would definitely be appreciated as an option.

Even though the laptop isn't perfect, however, it still does a good job at providing everything most people are likely to want or need. By keeping out most of the high-performance options, temperatures are held in check and the laptop still manages to be somewhat lightweight. If that price is still too high, however, HP has plenty of other similar laptops. Their dv6000z for example is nearly identical but uses AMD Turion X2 processors instead of Core 2 Duo, and you can save about $200 while still getting adequate performance.

One of the items that we haven't mentioned yet is that the integrated speakers are actually quite good for a laptop. They're not going to rival a good set of earphones or any desktop speakers, but compared to most tinny sounding laptop speakers they can provide a decent listening experience and they are loud enough that they could work for doing presentations in smaller group meetings.

We've also had good experiences with HP support personnel. They answer the phone quickly and they are usually able to help us with any difficulties that we "encounter". Since HP is a large company, they provide both 24/7 support as well as on-call support without charging an arm and a leg.

At the beginning of the article, we stated that two of the more important questions in regards to a laptop are the intended market and whether or not the laptop is able to meet the needs of the target audience. For the dv6500t, HP classifies it as an entertainment notebook, and that's more or less a fair description. Depending on what sort of entertainment you want, you might need to make a few changes from the basic configuration that we reviewed -- movie buffs might want to add the HD-DVD drive option, while those who play the occasional game will probably want to upgrade the graphics.

It's obvious that HP did spend some effort trying to keep costs down, and inevitably some corners get cut. The LCD panel is definitely one of those corners in this case, and we would be inclined to do a bit more comparative shopping before spending any money on this particular notebook. Others may not be so demanding, however, and for your typical computer user the dv6500t is a good overall value. The dv6500t is like your basic minivan: it won't turn any heads and you won't set any land speed records, but it will get you where you need to go with a minimum of hassle and you might still have some lunch money left over. This may not be a laptop for enthusiasts, but their parents, friends, or other relatives will more likely than not be quite happy with it.