HP Pavilion G6-2242ea review

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).