Best Ultra Portable laptop as on Date - HP DM1

HP Pavilion dm1

After a lot of reviews and searchers this is the model I settled in for as my second laptop on the go. My main areas of concern while searching for the laptop model were:

• With Windows 7 pre-loaded.
• I would use this as my travel laptop and hence light and compact was key.
• The battery life was important and was looking for one that would last the whole day on a single charge.
• Was looking at 10~11.6 inch screen and hence screen clarity was important. 
• Processing power to run Photoshop , Tally , Microsoft Office a good antivirus and of course play HD videos without bringing down performance.
• Ample disk space for storage.
• Bluetooth, Wifi and Lan [ Bluetooth to pair wireless headphone if i was in a public place and needed to do VOIP or watch movies ]

So in short I wanted to have a laptop the size of a net-book , with the battery life of a net-book but the performance of a laptop. Most net books came with an Atom processor that supported up to 2 Gig RAM and did not play HD videos. The big thing was not playing HD videos but to play HD videos smoothly quite a good amount of processing power is needed, so this is a good test of a laptops processing power [ i am ref to net-books and the ultra portables here and not the bigger laptops ] To make a long story short I finally found the HP Pavilion DM1 the right choice. It comes with the the new AMD dual core E-350 which combines the CPU and GPU [ Graphics Processing Unit ] into one chip increasing performance. I upgraded the RAM to 8 GB [4+4]  as it has 2 slots and comes with Windows 7 64 bit OS [ 32 bit supports only 4 Gig]. It gives a whooping 10.5 hrs of battery backup, charge it in the morning and use it all day. Have had the unit for 2 weeks now and find it a lovely piece of hardware.  

Specifications:

Genuine Windows® 7 Home Basic 64
AMD Athlon II Dual-Core E-350
1.6 GHz
2 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 - I upgraded this to 8GB
320 GB SATA (5400 rpm)
AMD Radeon HD 6310M
802.11 b/g/n; Bluetooth wireless networking
21.4 x 29 x 3.07 cm
Starting at 1.57 kg

Highlights : 10.5 hours backup , Great Performance, Up-gradable to 8 GB RAM , Windows 7 64bit Pre-loaded, 


Price: $ 512 / Rs.23,000 with 2 GB RAM

- Joseph