The laptop I will talk about today is the HP Pavilion dv6t-7000 Quad Edition. This was THE pavilion laptop to have back in 2012; that is, if you customized it with what mine came with when it left the factory. My unit had an i7-3630QM, 8GB of RAM, 2 250GB drives (1 mSATA, the other possibly a sata SSD? wasn't there when I got it), a GT 650M (Not to be confused with the desktop GTX 650 card), a 1920x1080 LCD, and a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1. Of course, what is a blog post on my page without some upgrades done?
I got this from my city dump several months back, but it was in very rough shape and I needed to find another dv6 to get parts from. Later I did find another dv6 for parts and I went to work. I have no photos of the process, but this took me quite a while to work on.
First, the keyboard needed to be replaced. As much as I love backlit keyboards, this one was about to fall apart on itself. Luckily, dv6 #2 had one in immaculate condition. Only the screen was broken on that one, and the CPU was significantly weaker than the one that I wanted to fix, so I used that one for parts. The new keyboard isn’t backlit, but it works great and it feels rather nice to type on. Just wish the keys weren’t so damn apart from each other.
Next, I needed to take the motherboard out of the old bottom case and put it in the new one. I swapped over the specification sticker and thought everything was fine, until I ran into a rather major roadblock.
THE HEADPHONE JACK WAS BROKEN.
This took me ages to replace properly and it was a royal pain in the ass to do so. Luckily, I still had the other board (which was worthless, a component burnt out on that one which could explain why it was unable to POST) and I had to go through removing the jack from there and putting it on the laptop I wanted to fix.
And you know what they say, “Everybody gangsta until the headphone jack’s audio quality is distorted.” I was so pissed and I was not willing to take the entire system apart AGAIN. Luckily the other jack went on just fine and I had no problems with that. Could be that I removed the mic jack and not the headphone jack on the other board…? Or it could be that the solder HP used is very stubborn like any other lead-free stuff that people use nowadays. Don’t quote me, but I feel like leaded solder is significantly more reliable than lead-free, despite its lower melting point.
Luckily, I got the system back up and running and it looks almost new… aside from scratches on the palmrest and some wear on the illuminated HP logo on the back of the screen.
So, what do I think? This laptop is absolutely wonderful for me so far. Not sure if the GPU will ever get to live for another year or 2 but other than that, this laptop packs quite a lot of power and could make a nice jukebox with its wonderful sound system! The mSATA SSD that was in here (some samsung 840 unit??) is faster than I expected it to be and paired with a 1TB 7200rpm HDD I had around, you can have great performance combined with a good amount of storage.
As for the graphics, I had Windows 10 on here at some point and it ran BeamNG.Drive fairly well with medium-low settings on the 650M. It would be cooler (Well, not really if we’re speaking temps) if this system was equipped with a GTX 660M, but that may have just been reserved for HP’s more high-profile product lines.
When you think of the words “HP Pavilion”, what do you think? Personally my mind immediately goes back to an old Intel “Celeron 4” laptop I had which ran at 2.4GHz and had Windows XP, later upgraded to Vista SP2. It was SLOW, even with XP; it was probably better suited for something like 2000. I have a system with the same chipset and I tried 98 Second Edition on it, but it didn’t want to complete setup.
Alright, back to the HP Pavilion name. This laptop is probably as “pavilion” as you could get. Wanted to go higher? You would have to look at HP Envy laptops, since those had more high-profile hardware compared to most pavilions. I’ve had tons of these pavilion laptops and desktops, and usually what I see is a system that can get stuff done with nothing unnecessary and nothing that could skimp out on the job. The laptop I have doesn’t really feel like a Pavilion, it feels more like an HP laptop that was heading more towards Envy than Pavilion. It was for those who had a budget slightly under $1000 at the time (The laptop was originally $899.99 in this configuration if I recall correctly, $1046.83 adjusted for inflation) but wanted a laptop that could get almost EVERYTHING done, provided it wasn’t a very intensive game best suited for desktop computers.
Don’t quote me on any of this, it’s merely what came up in my mind (except the price, I guess). As for what I’ve got, it’s still running very well and I managed to give it some much-needed upgrades and tweaks:
-i7-3610QM swapped for a 3630QM (not much of a difference, but I had the chip around so why not?)
-8GB RAM upgraded to 16GB by whoever had this laptop before, confirmed to be working
-1TB 7200rpm HDD alongside the existing mSATA drive
-802.11ac Intel 7260 wireless card from one broken Latitude E5440 (This system does not have a whitelist as far as I'm aware)
-Why the wireless card? This came with a Centrino 2230 which is single band (2.4GHz), and I knew it wouldn't cut it. The dual-band card works with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, which also helps if you want to connect to a 5GHz network. Also, 802.11ac is more advanced in technology. I am not aware of ANY Wi-Fi 6 cards that work with Mini PCIe. Wouldn't have to install one anyway, even 802.11 DRAFT-N is fine for me.
-I reapplied thermal paste as anyone who works on computer hardware AND has a brain would do. I even added some new thermal pads as well to replace the old ones.
-A proper fresh install of Windows 7 (I’m aware it’s out of support, but for now I don’t care much. I would use Linux, but literally half of my programs don’t work. Use what you are most comfortable with, do not persuade others to reconfigure their entire system. Do that in a professional environment and you'll probably get fired. Also, Windows 10 only runs well on current hardware, at least for me.)
-A 9-cell battery which works, but apparently has an issue where 3 status lights stay on if you press the status light button. I have no idea why this happens, could be a programming error. I might consider replacing said battery.
I could probably do more, but this laptop feels like it can’t go much further than this. Again, this was as “Pavilion” as you could get back in 2012, and not much further.
With the current crisis of computer chip shortages and a lack of available computers for many families across the world, see if you can make a difference and help fix older laptops to work like new again. You can donate them to charity, sell them online, or just give them out to someone. I’d sell my older crap if eBay didn’t shove managed payments up my ass.
Now why is my system reserved partition on my secondary HDD?
