Apr 05, 2006 09:31 PM
9383 Views
(Updated Apr 05, 2006 09:35 PM)
My hunt for a personal laptop began after my latest company gave me a mammoth Dell Inspiron. It was a real pain carrying it around. I wanted a sexy looking, powerful, light and small laptop for my personal use. I had the privilege of using laptops from IBM, HP, Toshiba and Dell. All of these were official laptops and I didn’t care about their appearance. Of all them I personally loved the IBM Think Pad even though it was slightly heavier than the rest. It was a class apart.
My most important requirements were 1- The laptop had to be sleek, light and black in colour. 2 - A bright widescreen that’s not bigger than 14 inches. I feel that the 15.4 inch models are fit to be called TVs not laptops. The laptop has to be real good looking. The ideal match was a Sony Vaio. The Vaio S series which I just loved was 1500 £. But I was no way going to spend so much when other machines with similar configuration were available for less than half the price.
I was left to choose from IBM, HP and Toshiba. I just used to hate the Dell laptops, they were crude looking, heavy pieces of plastic with poor finish. I would’ve loved to buy a Think Pad, but I did not find any widescreen models. I was left with HP and Toshiba. I compared the 14 inch models and the HP DV1000 was the clear winner. I fell in love with the laptop the day I saw it. It had a lot of goodies that came as a part of the package.
I finally bought the model with 1 GB RAM and 80 GB HDD and a 1.7 GHz Centrino processor for 900 £. I’ve used it for 3 months already. Here are some of the things I just loved which made me buy this…
It looks great. Even though its not as sexy as a Vaio, it much better than the Toshibas and the Dells. The dual colour styling with a grey outer and black keyboard looks good. The multimedia buttons with the dim blue lights made it look real neat. It was not at all heavy.
The screen is among the best. I would say the ‘bright view’ widescreen is almost as good as the Sony’s X-Brite screens with standard applications.
It has a built in card reader which I think reads 6 different types of standard memory cards. Saves the pain of having to buy and carry a memory card reader. This is better than the Sony which reads only Sony memory cards.
It comes with a real cute credit card sized remote control which sits in the PCMCIA card slot. You can switch on your laptop, and control all DVD controls with this remote control. Real useful while watching DVD’s and playing songs.
The Quick Play feature which allows you to watch DVDs and play mp3s in you laptop without having to boot windows.
It also had its share of standard goodies like Wireless Networking, dual layer DVD writer, 3 USB ports, S-Video port, Fire-wire port etc. It even has 2 headphone ports!!
The above pros made be buy it. However there are few other nice things I discovered on this laptop as I started using it for the first few days:
The battery life is excellent. I surfed for 3 hrs 45 min with wireless turned on before the battery drained. This is very good considering the bright screen.
It does not make any noise and you hardly feel it getting heated up when you keep it on your lap.
The design is very user friendly. Other than the power adaptor port we find all other ports on the left and right of the laptop. You need not turn your laptop to fix cables any more.
The keyboard is among the best. All the standard keys were available. The mouse touch-pad could be disabled to prevent the cursor from flying off while typing fast. I had seen this on earlier HP laptops also.
I really enjoyed watching DVDs on it. I expected the screen to be small. But it was good enough for watching movies.
The Altec-Lansing speakers were not at all bad.
Overall I was very satisfied with the design, quality of finish and features. The laptop is quiet fast but not as fast I expected a machine with this configuration to be. I tested it extensively for speed, and realized that it is not bad. Well no one uses a laptop for deploying a carrier grade application. People use it for MS office applications, surfing, playing songs/videos. This laptop has enough muscle for all this. Another area which exposes performance issues is gaming. However I’ve never tried any games on this laptop.
I can’t resist finding flaws. Also I know people who read the reviews look for this stuff most. Here are a few of them
The laptop does not close perfectly. There is small gap of 2-3 mm b/w the screen and keyboard even after the laptop is closed. The hooks that protrude from the top of the screen double up as wireless antennae and also the locking mechanism. This is hardly any cause for concern.
It’s a shame that this laptop does not have a built-in microphone. How can a multimedia entertainment laptop ship without a built-in microphone?
I sometimes feel that the laptop is too wide. Well no cribbing as this is a wide screen.
The touch pad is not smooth and has a matte finish. This may be irritating to a few users.
My laptop shipped with XP home and loads of useless crappy software from Microsoft. I would've loved to have MS Office instead of all the non-sense.
Here are few things that would’ve made the laptop even better. I would not call them cons
The charger can be even smaller. I don’t mean it’s a brick, but it can be still smaller.
A built in camera would have made it complete.
HP service is just excellent in the UK. My laptop stopped working after 3 months. It would just not power on. HP service picked it up from me the next day, repaired it in 5 days and send it back to me. It seems that the mother board was dead!!!. I was not surprised as these things are common with laptops of any brand. As long as you are covered by warranty you are safe.
I would finally say, if you want style and have the money don’t think about anything else just go and buy a Sony Vaio. They are a class apart. If you want real value for money, buy a Dell. If you want the best of both worlds buy this.
Hope my review helps. Your valuable comments are welcome.
Thanks
Ram
