HP 550 Notebook Reviews

This is one of the best pc I don’t own one as yet but will in a few days after which I can give you a full review on it I have been to the store and viewed it quite a few times and must say the 550 as a great feel to it a must have.

I have finally gotten the hp 550 notebook running Intel celeron 1400 @ 1.73 ghz and 1gb of ram its awesome highly portable pc the battery life is good a very sturdy feeling chasis the keys have aloud clicky sound and also a rubber feel the left and right mouse button the only fault I find is that it gets hot at times.

Hi John, glad to know you enjoyed your laptop, cause i´m thinking of buying one of these. How much does it cost? and how much do you think it would cost with a Core 2 duo 1.66 Ghz CPU and a 250 GB HDD? thanx.

love this laptop can someone email me at 100760@llandrillo.ac.uk and tell me how to use the blooth having trouble

Yes, it’s great. Brought one with 1.4GHz C2D, and 2GB RAM. Nice keyboard for typing long documents/programs. And display size more than enough for me.

Hi, can anyone here tell me how the fan noise is? Is it reasonable or is it annoying?

Best,
Tulse

I have brought one with core 2 duo 1.4ghz and 2gb of ram, runs better than my dell c2d with 2.6 ghz, and the screen bright is very good.
About the fan noise Tulse, is very silent (is impressive btw) , a very good option.

Bruno.

just used this machine for couple of months. It was given to me by my college, probably bulk buying, dozen or more have the fuzzy sound problem coming up, they say speaker replacement will be done.. I personally dont consider internal speakers made with such poor workmanship. or Do i consider it a design failure? what is the gurantee that they will work fine once replaced??

awesome laptop i got the 2ghz with 1gb ram but it got a great feel to it and very quiet.. speakers could be better but very good laptop. highly recommended *****

highly recommended *****

The fan is not silent. It’s very annoying. No matter what are you doing, it disturb you.

Great laptop, also has high compatibility with today’s linux distros. I own a core 2 duo T5470 with 2GB of RAM model. Even though the the processor clock is 1,6GHz it doesn’t feel like a partiularly slow machine. I’m a java developer, and running netbeans with big projects doesn’t seem to slow it down noticably. The fan IS quite loud. I’ve found one minor and one major flaw, that is worth mentioning. There is no HDD led. While one would think this is not a serious issue, I still find it quite irritating. The bigger problem is the location of the VGA connector. Since I’m a developer and the various IDE frames can use quite some screen space, I like using an external display with more size and resolution. BUT the VGA connector is next to the power connector, wich resoults in closstalk -> heavy flickering on the external display while AC power is on. It is crystal clear the instant you disconnect the the power chord. I’m still searching for a solution, but if you are planning to do a lot of presentations with external displays, eg. projectors, than this is not the machine for you.

I straight away formatted my machine on the day i bought it to get rid of Vista and placed XP SP2. I’m just failing to use the bluetooth. Infact, there’s no sign that it exists. I checked in the device manager and all drivers have been installed and there’s none that talks of bluetooth. Can someone help me out and tell me how to get it working?

Haven’t got this yet, but am looking at it. I like HP kit.

About the bluetooth drivers for XP – have you looked at the HP Driver website:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=uk&prodNameId=3765010&prodTypeId=321957&prodSeriesId=3764998&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=1093

Main Cons found on day one:

-All ports are on the left side, usb, modem, ethernet, express-card, vga and power (which is specially annoying).
-No HDD led (come on!)
-No power management software (you’ll have to live with windows power options)
-Only one speaker (no stereo)
-No direct volume control interface, you’ll have to FN+KEY

This laptop is good, if you downgrade to xp. With vista it’s terribly slow. Cost me some trouble, but all i had to do was disable the native sata in the bios… now it works like a charm.
This laptop has much brighter colors than my old one (didn’t realise until now).
The cons are; a bit crappier sound, and the mouse buttons don’t seem to respond all the time (so i mainly doubleclick on the pad).
Great value for money though!

Great Laptop! Excellent price / use relation. About the fan noise, never heard any sound coming out from the FAN, nor the speaker, LOL. Really lousy sound, no stereo.
About the conectors, nothing to say, it all fits perfecly, even though that they are all from the left side of the machine.
I bougth mine without any OS. Was a little bit cheapper, and Ubuntu Jaunty did it all for me. I repeat, GREAT LAPTOP.

only problem i found in this laptop is , Sound quality of in built speaker and thro line out is very poor.This laptop is not recmended for music lovers.

I have an Hp 550 Notebook, the cheap model with Intel Celeron, I use it with Ubuntu 9.1 with excelent performance, i wanted more ram memmory, but only taked 3 GB, refused to run with 4GB, i think is limited by the Celeron Processor; i have two annoing problems, the first is only have 3 usb ports and they are in the left, so using a mouse with cord you have to cross the wire from right to left siSP4796de, the other is a problem with the battery charger, the seller replce the first charger and now i have the same problem again.
I now use my old Toshiba Satelliite A135 SP4796, with UBUNTU 9.1 with superior results, fast, resourcefull, with accass to aroun 29000 packets or programs, thats the real advantage over a propietary system, where you have to purchase everything, and as a teacher in a public university with limited resourses, open source software is a definitive advantage, plus the resistance to virus. trojans, worms et al.

This laptop is freakin sweet I Love It..

Been using this laptop for almost a year now and hav had quite a gr8 experience, my only problem wit it was bluetooth connectivity, apparently its supposed to hav btooth bt hav downloaded drivers for it several times bt eres no sign of it anywr, lookin at e technical manual I realised ere’s a cable dat connects ur btooth adapter to e mboard n it comes wit e spare parts kit, only prob nw is wr to find this. Am usin e version wit e celeron M550 processor, 2.5g ram n its bn runnin pretty smooth, currently runnin Win7 n its nt ol dat bad. Very gd value for ur money tho!!

Hey guys
I have been using my HP550 for a little more than a year now without any problem….untill today.All of the speakers are not working(laptops spkrs) but i can hear when/if i connect headphones.Would some one pleaseeeeee help me out?

i have problem with my hp 550 when i put in a dvd disc the machine hangs terribly and also when i burn any dvd it behaves the same and it tells me that it is not a direct memory access wat do i do to solve this?

i have owned my hp 550 for a little over a year now and i only paid $350 for it at comp usa it was good at first but after a wile the windows vista basic that came with it kept crashing even with nothing on the hard drive… you cant open more then 3 files at a time unless you upgrade the ram. i have just put windows 7 16bit on it and now the comp runs great. the batt runs for three hours with a full charge, even with the speakers running and the screen on full brightness

Ok,. I am on my second one now,. The touch pad is horrible,. My left mouse button on the touch pad went out on both. I was amazed,.. that two different times,. Do not by this laptop it is complete shit,. HP should replace mine with something that is actually functional but fuck they won’t,. Do not by HP shit its garbage,. My two boys have laptops. 1 has toshiba also a piece of garbage,. My other son a ASUS and it appears to be a great laptop. So if this helps anyone do not buy toshiba or hp they are shit laptops.