Since beginning my student career three years ago having a laptop has been paramount not only for the requirements of my work (meaning, as a typical student, that my all nighters were allowed to continue past the library closing time of 12:00am) but also as an avid user of a whole multitude of different media. Since my first laptop was made by PC World's own brand Acer and decided more often than not that it would be plagued by some disaster or other which made using it more of a chore than a leisure, I opted for a more well-known, as well as well-trusted, brand in HP and I was most certainly not dissapointed.

The first thing that drew me to the G62 was its aesthetics; the matt colour as well as the bevelled pattern all make for a very slick and professional design. It's smaller than my previous Acer however this did not turn out to be a negative point in any respect once I began using it. My initial worry was the keypad, as I for one get very stuck in my ways after using a certain keypad as a touch-typist and it becomes very frustrating forcing my brain to understand a new layout of keys which each new computer I attempt to use (Don't even talk to me about Mac keyboards...) however I was incredibly impressed with the keyboard on the G62 as not only does the keypad feel just as big as the previous, even on a smaller laptop, but there is a certain familiar comfort in the keys here which those concerned with their typing habits will be sure to enjoy. The screen, too, is beautiful and makes up in resolution what it lacks in size to others in its field. All in all then, this is a beautiful laptop with only one real downfall (if it could even be called that) - and that it that in the pursuit of aesthetics, the touchpad is not defined by texture or by standing out from the surface, leading the unobserved user to sometimes swipe blandly around the base of the machine for a while before finding it. Usually this wouldn't even be worth mentioning but I felt I ought to say something to the negative...

Performance wise, the G62 is again something which I really can't find fault with. With strong processors and more than enough RAM for everyday use this laptop really can do everything that's needed of it. Gaming is course something that is to be recommended only for the top-end laptops, if not specialised desktops, however the few games I did try out here seemed to work incredibly well considering, the only problem being a small amount of lag in the higher-resolution games. that being sad, it's really only the very newest games you'll have a problem with here you'll generally find very little issue in your day-to-day gaming.
Another thing that impressed me from the off is the incredible speed of this laptop; from sleep to desktop in under 5 seconds for me was unbelievable compared to the 20-odd second wait of my old machine. Program start-up, too, is fantastically quick and unless you're running huge amount of software or your hard-drive is full to bursting, you'll really never experience any major slow down, and at 500gb of memory it's hardly unlikely that'll happen any time soon. The hard-drive size is probably the thing I was most impressed with in this model, as for a similar price many other brands will offer you a lot less and as a music and film obsessed student, hard-drive space was of incredible importance to me.

All in all this is a fantastic laptop which is absolutely perfect for all day-to-day use, but can definitely be pushed with some extremely impressive results. For the price and the amount of hard-drive space it really is everything you'll need for browsing, working, listening and watching.