If you want spanking fresh new pictures of the DM4, go to a website that is selling it. If you want a no-gloss-over-bullshit-fluffy pictures fresh from a user, they are right above.
Fortunately for me, the picture and the product differ little, except for a little defect on the mousepad that arrived with it. The pad was slightly lifted on right bottom corner, and had a weird feeling when in use and clicking. Promptly resolved with a warranty repair.
Now, to the meat of things.
We can see an i5 model along with the ATI Radeon 5450. As much as it is labelled i5, it is nothing like the multicores on the desktop variation. While satisfactorily fast, it still leaves me wishing for abit more when i pit it against my quadcore 9650 desktop at home. Nonetheless as a mobile platform, with abit of space and performance management, it gets by pretty well for an impatient person like me. Coupled with the 4 gig RAM option, it manages photoshop and illustrator cs 5 pretty well, loading them in 9 seconds. Featured with the DM4 is a switchable graphics between the integrated intel model, and the ATI Radeon 5450. The Intel card is for typical use and power conservation, while the ATI is for gaming. Pretty neat feature that allows you to change at any moment, except when the ATI is engaged in 3d applications such as games. The ATI manages medium settings for starcraft 2, so I’d call that decent, though its no trouting monster amongst laptop. If you want those, go for ASUS G73.
The island keyboard is just screaming “BACKLIGHTING” and really if it was included it’d be absolute pleasure. I however don’t expect a mid range laptop to include that nonetheless. It does provide a very good feeling for typing. Clean fast crisp keystrokes. its media buttons are integrated to the F1 to F12 keys, and by default the media keys operate in priority instead of the F1 to F12 function. For its cost however, it has nice aluminium etching desgin on its surface, which makes garskin look like child’s play. Very good choice of aesthetic indeed. Enough said. To be seen and no needed to be described.
Many have compliant about the uselessness of the mouse pad’s multitouch functions, which I would say it functions, but its accuracy of execution is certainly a far cry from that of a Mac. So is the tracking during the operation of the multitouch.
Right next to the mouse pad is a the fingerprint reader. By far it is rather accurate, erring just a tad slightly on being too sensitive to register a correct print, and a wrong print certainly won’t get through. The reader is also associated to a program included which helps you log in sites by using your finger print, and it does this by saving the username and password while tagging these information to the sites which you designate as authorized for finger print access. Neat feature.
The IO ports avaliable to this laptop is standard fare other than the eSATA/USB 2-in-1 port which required some strength to plug and unplug. Otherwise, it is just plain genius to have such a option, even if I have yet to utilize it. This bring us up to a total of 3 USB port, and quite a good number to work with for a laptop of this size.
Screen comes in a glossy coat which may tend to be irritating when put to use against strong light or any kind, but the screen brightness at max level can more than make up. Usually. Clarity of the screen does not of any kind of complaints and are pleasingly sharp in almost all cases of use. I may personally find the colors requring a tad more saturation at worst, otherwise its perfectly fine as well.
One of the main attractiveness to this laptop lies in the aluminium etching design on the screen-side cover and the palm rest area. It certainly even make mac owners turn their heads, quite literally, from my experience. However the one very unfortunate thing about this is that if ever in its life time it has the sad chance of meeting an unfriendly bump from an object sharp enough, a permanent scar is likely to stay, and a very obvious one at that. I now 2 of these and I am still searching for a way to alleviate the unpleasant form. Do take care with where you place your DM4.
HP has an entire suite of maintainence and tuning software but I find that they are slightly buggy. For the most part they are just GUI which helps to link to individual microsoft tuning and maintainence software such a disk defragmentator and merely helps you execute them all together or seperately, for all these options simply use windows 7 onboard programs to perform their task and do not offer any significant improvements beyond them. HP also included by default the ability to back up your laptop either from its backup drive or by creating restore disks, which I think was really important as I have used it more than once already.
All in all this package is more than satisfying for the poor student squeezing every ounce of productivity out of every penny, and supports enough hardware to run starcraft 2 considerably after the other 3-D software that has to function, and considering the added styling to laptop, it really has my vote as a very cost efficient option to mobile computing.
UPDATE: After a year of use thus far, its functions and speed has not deteriorated by much, nor its charging capacity (provided you take care to remove the battery whenever we are plugging in and the battery is full).
