HP Pavilion G6-2242ea review

The G6-2242ea is a very cheap laptop, but it still looks stylish. Its smart purple lid and interior and smooth curves set it a world apart from most other budget models. It’s right up there with the Lenovo’s IdeaPad S400, which is another cheap laptop with a dash of flash. It’s unusual to see a laptop that looks this good and feels so expensive for only slightly more cash than an ultra-budget netbook.

The G6-2242ea also seems to have an impressive specification. You’re well served for storage options, thanks to a generous 750GB hard drive and a DVD writer, and there are three USB ports for external devices, two of which are the newer, faster USB3 type. Seeing a hard disk this big on such a cheap laptop is surprising, and, while optical drives may be on the way out, it’s still useful to be able to burn music CDs to use in the car or photo CDs to send to relatives. There’s also a VGA and HDMI port for connecting the laptop to an external monitor, and a card reader to copy photos straight from high-capacity SDXC cards.

The laptop’s touchpad is much better than the IdeaPad S400’s, with two individual buttons and a slightly textured surface that didn’t cause too much friction or, indeed, frustration over a lack of precision. We had no problem at all bringing up the Windows 8 Charms bar and scrolling between windows by swiping at the edges of the touchpad, and the touchpad was similarly responsive when pinching the screen to zoom in. Its full-sized Chiclet style keyboard is also far more comfortable to type on. The arrow keys were a bit too small for our liking, but all the keys had plenty of bounce and were very evenly spaced apart, and we were typing at full speed in no time at all.

We were also impressed with the laptop’s display. A resolution of 1,366×768 is standard for a 15in screen on a budget laptop, and is plenty for most tasks, if not for working on two documents side by side. The screen’s image quality is great. Our tests showed colours to be bright and vibrant and, as shown by the high level of detail in both the light and dark areas of our test photos, there’s an impressive level of contrast. As always with glossy screen finishes, overhead reflections can be a problem, but there’s plenty of screen tilt to compensate for this.

Things were shaping up well for the G6-2242ea, but, unfortunately, the laptop is seriously slow. Its AMD E2-1800 APU processor only runs at 1.7GHz, and even its 6GB RAM couldn’t improve its performance in our multimedia benchmarks, where it ended up with a pitiful score of 11. This makes it even slower than the Lenovo IdeaPad S400, and puts this nearly in netbook territory. This is definitely a web browsing and office document-only laptop. Even 6GB of RAM, which would normally help with multitasking, is out of place here; there’s no point running several intensive applications at once if the processor isn’t quick enough to do the job properly, as a laughable score of 7 in our multitasking benchmark shows.

The G6-2242ea’s AMD Radeon HD 7340G graphics chipset performed equally badly in our Dirt Showdown graphics test as well, which it failed to run at our standard 1,280×720 resolution with 4x anti-aliasing and High detail. It just about scraped 15fps when we set it to Low Quality and disabled the anti-aliasing at the same resolution, but this is still far from playable. It’s old games and 2D casual titles only for this laptop, but at least you’ll have plenty of titles to choose from in the Windows 8 Store. Battery life was slightly more impressive, with 5 hours and 25 minutes in our battery life tests, which is what we expect from an inexpensive 15in laptop. The HP’s 2.5kg weight means you’re unlikely to want to lug this laptop around for long, though.

The HP Pavilion G6-2242ea has a lot going for it, such as a good keyboard and touchpad, an impressive screen and a very low price, but it’s just too slow for us to recommend. For another £70 you could have the touchscreen Asus VivoBook S200, and for just £20 more you could buy the vastly faster Acer Aspire E1-571 (review coming shortly).