4. HP Pavilion DV9296xx, Continued

The right side of the case offers (from left to right): A single USB port, the ExpressCard slot, the optical drive, another USB port and the power connector.

The left side of the case is chock full of components, starting with a security cable slot at the far left (from left to right) in the top deck near the hinge. Next you'll see the S-Video jack, a VGA port, an expansion port for the nice dock that HP offers for this notebook, an RJ-45 next to an RJ-11 jack (the former for LAN, the latter for modem connections), an HDMI port (the cable is included as well), two more USB ports, a Firewire port and the media slot for the memory card reader.

The front of the case features bright blue LEDs for power, battery, IDE drive activity, and a wireless slide switch (left is on, right is off) with its own indicator light just to its right. At the left middle, you'll find an IR receiver lens, with three audio jacks to its right: audio-in/microphone, audio-out/headphone and an SPDIF out. The cover slide latch sits at the middle right.

Watching TV and DVDs on the HP is a positive experience, though the glossy bright screen is subject to reflections in brightly-lit environments (and shows dust and fingerprints a little too well). Nevertheless, the colors are reasonably bright and the contrast is good enough that fairly dark scenes remain viewable (really dark ones get pretty dim, though). The quality of images is good and remains sharp and free of artifacts even during high-speed motion scenes. This unit does well playing conventional DVDs and does all right with HD-DVDs.

Listening to music is also about as pleasant as it gets on a notebook computer. Though the speakers include no separate bass element, channel separation is good and sound quality is likewise. As with the dv8000 series unit we reviewed earlier this year, maximum volume level isn't loud enough to fill a big room, but suffices nicely for personal entertainment (though sound quality is better and volume levels more dramatic on headphones).

The HP unit includes a built-in IR receiver, so you needn't give up a USB port to use the remote - unless you want to use an IR blaster to drive a set-top cable or satellite box through MCE. In that case it's a must, which explains why HP includes one with this unit, along with two IR blasters. The HP remote is about the same size and weight as the Microsoft MCE remote, but comes in black, features a slightly different button layout, and isn't as nicely curved to fit in your hand.

Overall, this notebook features a pretty intuitive design and nice usability. Its controls remain easy to understand and use: unlike other MCE notebooks we've used, we could figure out its controls without consulting the manual. Even special uses for the function keys are well labeled and reasonably easy to learn and use. Overall the HP dv9296xx is noticeably lighter and a bit easier to manhandle than the Qosmio, which remains a big, bulky and bodacious beast of a multimedia notebook.

In the next section, we'll work through these same basics for the other notebook in this review: the latest Toshiba Qosmio.