HP Dandelion Breeze Laptop

The HP Dandelion Breeze Laptop is really a HP Pavilion 6 dressed up a little to make it look pretty. Under the hood, this is a very good computing machine for the money.

Some of the technical aspects are:

• AMD Dual-Core A4-3300M processor 2.5GHz. The Radeon HD 6480G graphics card is integrated into the processor. I would suggest that if you are going to be using your laptop for heavily loaded processes taking a lot of resources, that you would look elsewhere. However, this processor will allow you to perform almost all activities that most of us do on a regular basis with a breeze.
• 4GB DDR3 SDRAM system memory. I have a laptop that runs 2GB and I am more than happy with it. I can't imagine how much happier I would be with 4GB and this HP laptop is upgradable to 8GB of RAM.
• 640GB SATA Hard Drive. This huge hard drive will allow you to store up to 426,000 photos, 182,000 average length songs, or 336 hours of HD video. This is a huge difference from many of the budget laptops you will find which only have a hard drive of about 200GB tops. With this hard drive, you can avoid having to purchase an extra external drive to store all of your media.
• 2MB L2 cache featuring AMD AllDay Power with extended battery life.In order to take advantage of this wonderful feature (my laptop battery lasts 2 hours, I don't even use it) make sure your settings are optimized for battery use. Dull your screen a little bit and you probably can't run applications or games that take a lot of processing power in order to run your battery all day. In fact, this feature is a little misleading because this laptop is advertised as having a battery life of 4 hours. Not all day, but it's better than most laptops that I have used.

The HP Dandelion Breeze laptop comes preloaded with a lot of the software that you would expect for a PC, but I was pleasantly surprised with some of the extras that you receive as well.

Of course, it comes with Windows 7. Your computer is preloaded with Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium version. I haven't upgraded my tower computer with this great operating system yet, but I am very pleased with the performance of Windows 7 on my laptop. All of the deals for Windows 7 are too great to get into detail about here, but if you would like to read more, there is a great resource describing all of the benefits here.

It also comes with Microsoft Office Starter 2010. I have never heard of this before and I think the idea is great. You get limited functionality of Microsoft Office 2010 supported by advertising. I really wish my computer had come with this because it would save me a lot of time opening spreadsheets that I've sent home from work or downloaded. Most of the time I don't need to do anything complicated and I can see where the average adult user would only need this version for occasional viewing of spreadsheets or documents.

Other software included with this laptop include HP Support Assistant, HP Recovery Manager, Skype, Cyberlink Power DVD, Windows Live Essentials, a 60 day trial of Norton Internet Security 11, HP Games, and more. I would personally recommend that you don't use the Norton antivirus software that's included with this system because from all of my previous experiences, it will just bog down your system. Instead, download the full AVG Internet Security suite instead. I think it's a much better value and it will keep you more protected from the nasties out there trying to mess with your computer.

If you really enjoy the value that you get with the HP Pavilion 6 laptop, but you're really not into the Dandelion Breeze design, you may be interested in one of the laptops below. You could also save some money as well.

I only listed the hardware under the hood above, there are even more goodies included on this HP laptop.

• Super Multi DVD burner. You can watch and burn CD's and DVD's in all formats with this burner.
• Integrated 10/100 Base-T Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN. This sounds complicated, but in reality this is what allows you to connect to the internet. Either connect directly to a modem or connect over a wireless connection, it's all included with this laptop so you don't need to mess with any adapters. I haven't seen anything about Bluetooth being built in which is a bummer because that is a feature I wish I had on my current laptop. The good news is they are not expensive and you can find more information about laptop Bluetooth adapters here.
• 15.6" HP BrightView LED display @ 1366x768 max resolution. I love the idea of a little bit larger screen on a laptop, I think mine has a 14" screen and I don't even notice the difference when I'm moving from my work machine which is 22" to this smaller screen. The screen on this HP notebook makes me a little jealous though.
• Other hardware included.Built in webcam, digital media reader for SD and multimedia cards, touchpad, 3 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x RJ-45 Ethernet port, 1 x VGA port, 1 x HDMI, 1 x headphone jack and 1 x microphone jack.

If you would like to match your new laptop with compatible accessories, you should consider adding the items below.

The stylish HP Laptop Sleeve helps protect your laptop when carried by itself or inside your favorite bag. It includes a faux-fur interior, a back zipper pocket for essential accessories and comfortable handles. This sleeve is custom made to fit your HP laptop and features the Dandelion Breeze pattern.

HP Laptop Sleeve, Dandelion Breeze Sleeve - $19.88

The HP Wireless Optical Mobile Mouse has advanced 2.4GHz wireless technology for less interference and longer range of operation to work further away.

HP Wireless Optical Mobile Mouse, Dandelion Breeze - $24.88

Your Dandelion laptop comes with a limited one year warranty and 1 year of free toll-free support.

Before you get started with using your new computer, you MUST create a backup restore CD. Part of the reason computers have been able to come down in price is because backup and restore CD's of the included software are no long packed in with your computer. It only takes 10 minutes of your time and if you ever need to restore your system to factory defaults, you will be more than happy about creating your backup disk.