HP 550 Review

April 8, 2009 by admin
Filed under: HP Laptop Reviews 
HP Compaq 550

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WRITE A REVIEW ON HP COMPAQ 550 LAPTOP

Place a HP 550 laptop next to the older HP 530 model and you’ll see little design changes. Yet, noticeable changes were made to the keyboard and base specification for the HP 550.

The HP 550 design is simple yet sensible. Tough but smooth plastic make up the HP 550, offering it enough protection so that it can endure crushing blows in a laptop case. No doubt, the HP 550 manufacturers thought about how abused a laptop could be when used or when put away.

Features of HP 550

Unfortunately, the HP 550 doesn’t have the battery life travelers typically need: just under three hours of juice before it has to be recharged. However, it’s not very heavy, weighing about 2.6 kg.

If you want images on your screen to be crisp and clear, then you will love the HP 550’s huge widescreen panel. The Intel GMA X3100 deals with all the graphics you see on the laptop. It’s ideal for watching your favorite movies on the laptop’s DVD rewriter optical drive. You can view web pages easily and clearly. There is a slight downside to the Intel GMA X3100 graphics card. You can only play basic games such as Spider Solitaire, Solitaire, Freecell, etc.

Keep in mind that the screen is able to tilt back thus covering the back half of the chassis. Due to this design, there are no ports located on the laptop’s backend. However, you will find ports on the sides of the HP laptop. The three USB ports are located on one side close together and for the majority of people, this design does fine. However, if you need to use a peripheral that’s bigger than the usual USB memory key, you’ll be slightly out of luck with the HP 550 design.

Inside the HP 550, you’ll have an Intel Celeron CPU with 1026 megabyte of memory. At current time, it’s able to handle Windows Vista but doesn’t have the ability to handle a lot of software applications at once. As long as you need it for general web surfing and word processing, the HP 550 will be plenty for you.

Previous HP models had better keyboards than the HP 550. The keyboard keys are still the same square shape with its minor dip in the middle. This helps to keep you from slipping off the keys. Yet, the HP 550 keyboard rattles when you type. On top of that, the mouse buttons has a soft response when you touch them.

Performance wise, the HP 550 lacks speed with other laptops. Yet, it is easy to use. You may not like the rattle of the keyboard but you’ll fall in love with the big, bright screen.

HP 550 Specifications and Features

  • Intel 2.0 GHz Celeron M Processor
  • Intel GMA X3100 Graphics Processor
  • 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory
  • L2 Cache Memory
  • 160 GB Hard Drive
  • 15.4″ TFT 1280 x 800 Active Matrix Display
  • IEEE 802.11b/g wireless, Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Network Adapter
  • Optical Drive – DVD Writer integrated
  • Lithium Ion Battery up to 3.75 hours
  • Microsoft Windows Vista Home

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Comments

2 Comments on HP 550 Review

  1. Toshiba Satellite Pro L300 Review | Internet Laptop Reviews on Wed, 22nd Apr 2009 6:40 am

    2. [...] Pro L300 laptop is what you need. In fact, this Toshiba laptop competes against the laptops HP 550 and Asus X58C for [...]

  2. Kim on Wed, 8th Jul 2009 10:09 pm

    3. Currently the 550’s come with:
    Operating System: MS Windows Vista Business Licence + XP Pro Preloaded
    Processer:
    Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T5670 (1.8GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB)
    Memory: 1024 MB (1 x 1024 MB) DDR2 SDRAM (667 MHz)

    Note that if you wish you can load it up with 3Gb of RAM (800MHz!!!) for about AU$50 . I would recommend this as the X3100 uses shared memory.

    Having had the machine for less than a week I find that it is generally a good performer out doing my work Dell Latitude D630C also running XP Pro.

    As a home computer it performs very nicely being able to play a DVD, surf the net, read my mail and run Office applications all at once without issue.

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