The first thing you'll notice about the Artist Edition is, of course, its case design. On its glossy lid, you'll find Oliveira's eye-popping smorgasbord of cyan and orange shapes, a Chinese dragon, samurai silhouettes, bonsai trees, a yin and yang, and more. This design continues on the notebook's palm rests, and is also featured on the mustard-colored canvas messenger bag that comes with the system.
The Artist Edition's brown, painted keyboard provides just the right amount of spring; we found long typing sessions to be very comfortable. The system's glossy 14.1-inch wide-screen display and 5.6-pound weight make this it a very suitable travel notebook, yet it's large enough for enjoyable DVD viewing.
In fact, media playback is one of the Artist Edition's strong points. Its glossy 1,280x800-resolution LCD rarely becomes distracting, whether used under bright lights or outside, and its Altec Lansing speakers deliver good kick; there's also an ExpressCard slot, where you can store the included HP Mobile Remote. Like many of HP's media-centered notebooks, the system features blue-backlit multimedia control buttons above the keyboard. Just below the roomy, gold-colored touch pad, you'll find dual headphone jacks, so two people can listen to music or watch a film without distracting others. With all this multimedia goodness, we expected the notebook's 6-cell battery to have performed a bit better on our DVD rundown test: We squeezed out 1 hour and 54 minutes with the screen brightness set to maximum and all power-saving features disabled.
The Artist Edition did fairly well on our performance tests. Our system came with a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU and 2GB of RAM; currently, however, this particular CPU is not being offered on HP's online store. (You can opt for the slightly-slower 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7250, or one of Intel's new mobile Penryn models.) Our review unit delivered a decent 3,116 on Futuremark's PCMark Vantage; we couldn't get the system to run PCMark05. As expected, the Artist Edition shined on our multimedia tests: It needed just 4 minutes and 24 seconds to complete our iTunes conversion test, and 7 minutes and 8 seconds for our Windows Media Encoder 9 trial. The notebook's Cinebench 9.5 and Cinebench 10 scores (684 and 4,263, respectively) were decent, if not exceptional.
