HP G60, a Beautifully 2010s laptop

[LloydLynx]

Are you tired of matte textures, minimalism, and thin bendable laptops? Do you like gloss and rounded edges? Then you'll love this laptop.

 

This was a single owner all original machine until I got my hands on it recently. The only damage was some keyboard wear and clogged cooling, until I bend and nicked up the keyboard bezel taking the laptop apart. I gave everything a good cleaning and repasted the CPU. 

 

Specs

In terms of specs, this laptop has single core Celeron 900 fixed at 2.2Ghz, 3GB of DDR2 RAM, the original 250GB spinning rust HDD, Intel Mobile 4 Series (not 4th gen) integrated graphics, a 1366x768 15.6" glossy TN display, stereo upward firing speakers, top bezel mono microphone, and Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 802.11b/g/n Wireless Networking. I/O includes a barrel connector for power, 10/100 ethernet, dial up modem port, 3 USB2.0 ports, 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks, and a lightScribe optical drive. 

 

The 6 cell 47Wh battery is worn down to 39Wh, getting a bit less than 2 hours under light load. 

 

User Experience

You might be wondering how it is using a Celeron 900 with 3GB of RAM being fed by a 13 year old mobile hard drive. Or what you could even use it for. I use it as a 'round the house laptop. As you'd expect, it's quite slow, even running Void Linux with Wayland KDE. And it becomes hard to use if you try to do more than one thing at once. But if you can excuse the slowness, it's actually a pretty good user experience in my opinion.

 

Compared to what I'm used to, the touchpad is accurate and feels good with the glossy texture. Best if your finger is dry. And I like that it's one with the palmrest with the smooth sunken in edges. The gloss texture and smooth edges also mean it's super easy to clean. Unfortunately, there's no horizontal scrolling. The buttons would feel nice if the left click wasn't so worn out, so I can only really judge the right button. It's a shallow solid click that doesn't require much force and feels good. Luckily, the buttons are on a doughterboard, so replacing them doesn't mean replacing a perfectly good motherboard. Tap-to-click actually feels pretty good on this touchpad.

 

The keyboard does look worn out, but the membrane switches feel better than my daily driver Latitude. They're slighly ligher to press and have better spring back so I don't have to use as much force to lift my fingers. There's a number keypad to the right. The key placement makes well enough sense, except for the upside down Fn volume keys that are part of the keypad. The palm rest feels so good and is so easy to wipe clean, you don't really think about it.

 

The display is a rather standard 1366x768 at 60Hz with decently thin bezels of the era. It's only a TN panel, but it's a pretty respectable TN panel. Colors, contrast, and brightness are all very impressive to my semi-trained eyes. And it's completely glossy, which means crystal clear without any light diffusion. I could look at this screen for hours with minimal fatigue, and I sometimes do. 

 

Aesthetic

This is what really makes this laptop special to me. The palmrest is glossy silver plastic with rounded edges, and the back of the display is a glossy black plastic with rounded edges and a metalic hp logo. The keyboard bezel is a metalic silver with an awesome looking fade for the speaker mesh texture on the sides of the keyboard, along with mesh lights for the caps lock on/off and the touchpad enable/disable button which glows either white or orange. The power button is round and flat, glowing white. While the small concave WiFi button to its right glows blue when enabled, and orange when disabled. The keyboard is matte black with white printing, as well as the display bezel. Bottom case of the laptop is a rough matte black texture. 

 

The touchpad stands out with the pill shaped buttons, rounded printed scroll bar, and the round smooth edges that join it as one piece with the palmrest. The glossy silver plastic makes the look work well. 

 

And of course I had to theme out KDE to match the aesthetic of this laptop, including one of those weird wallpapers that came with Windows 7.

Spoiler

This review was written in full using the HP G60. I've been enjoying this laptop since December 20th 2022, and I'm writting this review as of January 21st 2023.