Back to School Review: HP's DM1 Laptop is a Versatile Little 12” Beast

System First Boot/Use and Technical Support

When it comes to the HP DM1 first startup, it isn’t really any different from any other HP laptop/desktop. The DM1 goes through and gives you a tour of the computer and included software and then prompts you to register with HP for warranty and support purposes. There wasn’t anything necessarily impressive about this other than a few customization options here and there. The boot time itself was very quick and didn’t leave us to believe for one moment that the processor was a dual core clocked at 1.6 GHz. Oh, and it comes with a full version of Windows 7 rather than the starter piece of junk version you get on a netbook.



Frankly, during our first use the HP DM1 basically operated as a computer and we continued to experience this type of use for the entirety of our review. For almost as long as we could remember, the HP DM1 served itself wonderfully. We made the DM1 our daily computer as it travelled with us to E3 and other conferences and put itself through the paces with thousands of high definition photos and hours of 1080P videos. We played many videos on the DM1 via the BluRay drive, hard drive, and off of a USB and it stood up to the task wonderfully, something that most computers priced around that price range cannot say. Simply put, most netbooks cannot play back 1080P content without some sort of lag. Not to mention their resolution isn’t as high as the DM1’s either. This also included playing back/streaming 1080P videos off of YouTube, which nobody in their right mind would attempt on an entry-level laptop nor netbook.

We literally made the HP DM1 our daily computer for on-the-go computing. And it simply did not disappoint us. We were able to get 6+ hours of heavy use out of it without worrying about needing a charger. Because of this, we actually used the DM1 for our 4G LTE testing as we needed to be mobile when we did this testing and it allowed us to content via 4G for hours as we drove around testing. Even though the laptop is ‘rated’ for “9.5+” hours, realistically you can expect anywhere between 6-8 hours depending on whether or not you run it at maximum brightness and whether or not you have wifi on. Furthermore, AMD has implemented advanced power profiles in the laptop in addition to the already existing ones for Windows 7 in order to further improve performance or battery life depending on the usage scenario and these can be adapted on the fly as your usage needs change. The one thing that we really wish HP had done was to include the option for a slightly chunkier 8-cell battery as the only options available for this model are 6-cell.