PROS
Nice price. Almost five hours of battery life. 6GB of system memory.
CONS
USB 3.0 ports are black. No touch screen. Slow photo editing.
BOTTOM LINE
The HP Pavilion G6-2248CA is a full-featured laptop with good battery life and a low price. But performance is mediocre even for a budget laptop.
The HP Pavilion G6-2248CA($449.99), available in Canada, is a good, not great, buy for the price. It’s a full-featured 15.6-inch laptop for under$475. It has decent battery life, but otherwise has mediocre performance numbers. It’s designed to be a workhorse alternative to the inexpensive tablets of the world. It’s not a perfect value PC, considering its competition, but for the price you may be able to overlook the occasional wait for the PC to finish the tasks you’re performing.
Design and Features
The G6-2248CA is pretty standard looking. It’s designed to be appeal to most of the population, so it has basic looks with a glossy black visage. The 15.6-inch screen dictates the size of the chassis, which is 3.6 by 37.6 by 24.4 cm( HWD), and the system weighs about five and a half pounds. It’s a little heavy compared to the ultrabooks you see promoted by Intel, but it’s certainly portable enough for the home or college campus. The G6-2248CA comes with a chiclet-style keyboard with full numeric keypad, which may come in handy if you’re entering a lot of numbers, like in actuarial or engineering programs. The keyboard isn’t backlit, but that’s okay since the system is so inexpensive.
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The G6-2248CA has a textured surface on its trackpad, which can help keep it from feeling tacky if you use the system while munching on cheese puffs, for example. The multi-touch trackpad supports Windows 8 gestures like bringing up the charms bar. The screen supports 1, 366-by-768 native resolution, sufficient for 720p HD, though 1080p HD will have to be scaled down for the screen. The system was certainly powerful enough to view both types of HD video from online sources.
The system has a decent amount of connectivity, with two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, VGA, Ethernet, and HDMI. Be careful with the USB ports, as all of them are black. USB 3.0 ports are more commonly molded in blue plastic on other systems to help you tell them apart from the slower USB 2.0 ports. The system also has a SD card reader and DVD burner. The DVD contributes to the thickness of the system, but may be important for casual users that still want to use older programs found on DVDs or CDs. The G6-2248CA comes with 6GB of memory and a 750GB hard drive. The 6GB is a good amount, and more memory lets you open more tabs simultaneously or multitask running several programs at once. In contrast, the more expensive