February 6, 201313 yr Got myself a HP Pavilion DV7-3079WM about two years ago. Been a beast from day one and a very-surprisingly strong performer for games - I actually do pretty well with FSX if I am careful with what addons I fly with. Some heavy-hitting planes along with any addon airport scenery is typically too much for my medium-high settings, but using a reasonable aircraft out of a default airport with environmental/ground scenery upgrades, I easily get 20-25 average frame rates. In short, I have been very happy with this laptop, as I did not expect it to be as good as it has been. AMD Dual core M600 at 2.4GHz (Have not even touched or really even thought about overclocking - not something I want to try without the ability to add cooling options) 4 GB RAM ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 Dual 320GB Drives 17" 1600x900 Screen ...... along with a bunch of other good stuff. It still, to this day, runs just as strong as day one, especially with a fresh install of Win7 about a month ago. Not a totally necessary procedure but performance was starting to slow a little bit after having the original factory Win7 installation for almost two years. However, my 18-month-old son was sitting on my lap one day and threw a toy at the screen - caused three large groups of dead pixels, each about the size of a ladybug or slightly larger. So yeah, imagine three big bugs on your screen at all times - :lol: Been putting up with it for some time now but I decided to not just replace the screen, but to give this good machine a big overhaul - here's what I go coming up! Brand new 17" screen - should be interesting to install as these DV7's don't have the easiest installation procedures Replacing Hard Drive #1 with a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD - boot-up times are projected to go from 30+ seconds to around 10 seconds. Replacing Hard Drive #2 with a 750GB Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive (Standard drive that spins at 7200RPM but is supplemented by a small SSD for performance levels that are somewhere between a true SSD and a HDD). This is the drive that will carry my FSX installation as well as storage - FSX takes about 300GB as it is right now. Replacing the two 2GB memory sticks with two 4GB sticks for 8GB total, doubling the memory. Hard Drive #1 will be replacing my aging PlayStation 3's 60GB drive, which is consistently complaining of no drive space. Hard Drive #2 will be installed into an external enclosure as a supplemental storage space. All that for $475 after two-day shipping. (well that includes a couple of other things... 9MM snap caps for my new S&W M&P 9MM, Cree 7W 300LM Mini LED Flashlight, the external hard drive enclosure, etc) I am so excited about seeing this thing get new life breathed into it! If only it were possible to upgrade the CPU/GPU :( Not excited about: Re-installing my highly customized FSX installation :huh:
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