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The HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea is certainly a small laptop, with dimensions of just 29.2 x 21.5 x 3.2cm, and a weight of only 1.6kg. This makes it almost as small and portable as the much maligned netbooks but, crucially, it also has enough power to handle most tasks.
Packed onto the small chassis of the laptop are VGA, HDMI and Ethernet ports. There's a combined headphone out/microphone in jack and three USB 2.0 ports. It's a bit disappointing that there are none of the faster USB 3.0 ports included, since these are becoming increasingly common on new laptops.
To keep the computer small, there's no optical drive for reading CDs or DVDs, so you'll have to rip music and video to a USB stick to make the most out of this laptop's media-playing capabilities.
HP bills the HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea as an "Entertainment Notebook PC". This conjures up expectations of a machine that's capable of handling media with ease, and maybe even a few casual games. Where the HP Pavilion dm1-3100sa was let down with its handling of high-definition content, we expect the HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea to have no such trouble.
On paper, things don't look too bad. The HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea uses an AMD Radeon HD 6320M integrated graphics card. It comes with some automatic overclocking tools to give it a bit of a needed boost, and with DirectX11 support, it can handle low- to mid-range games.
Graphically demanding newer games are definitely a no-no, though. This is because while the AMD Radeon HD 6320M inside the HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea can theoretically use up to 1.92GB of memory for graphics, it doesn't actually have dedicated graphics memory, so it needs to share memory with the rest of the PC.
This means if you're running a few graphic-intensive programs, along with other applications that need memory, the strain is going to show. The 11.6-inch screen has a resolution of 1366 x 768, which is fine for high-definition movies.
Although there's a lack of dedicated graphics memory, HP has been very generous by including 4GB of DDR3 RAM with the HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea. This is more than enough for most applications, and it's nice to see that HP hasn't hobbled the HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea by cutting the RAM to 2GB to lower costs.
Processor-wise, the HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea comes with a 1.65 GHz AMD Dual-Core E-450. This processor has been specially designed by AMD to work in laptops, with lower power consumption that leads to greater battery life and saves the components inside the HP Pavilion dm1-4027ea's small body from overheating.
While it's no competition for the Intel Core i5 and i7 processors found in higher-end (and much more expensive) laptops, this dual core processor is meaty enough for a lot of tasks, and pleasingly powerful, considering the size of the laptop.
