Two laptops, HP or Dell?

August 28th, 2008

Two laptops, HP or Dell?

by admin

I’ve never been a strong advocate of laptops until recently. Until a month ago, unless an individual had an extremely compelling reason not to do so, I would always recommend buying a desktop for the same money as it usually bought you more. Previous generations of laptops were notorious for being out of date the instant your peeled back the wrapper. However, two weeks ago, I bought two laptops and my opinions changed. Here, I’d like to speak a little bit about the two machines and contrast their relative merits and demerits.

First, let me say that I have owned laptops in the past. Also, I’ve also worked with laptops as part of my job, so I consider myself fairly well versed with them, at least in their previous incarnations. The reason I bought two recently is that I have quite a bit of travelling planned over the ensuing months and, as anyone in IT will tell you, laptops are indispensible under such circumstances.

So, what did I buy? The first was an HP machine. Officially labelled an “Entertainment Notebook PC” (and part of the dv6800 series) it is equipped with some nice multimedia features, including a series of QuickPlay touch keys along the top of the keyboard. The three overriding factors that made me choose this machine over its neighbours on the shop shelf were: the 3GB RAM, the size and clarity of the screen, and the X2 64-bit processors. I thought all this for under $800 was a steal. Other positives for this machine include a well contructed and highly usable pointing device (usually I have problems with laptop pointing devices, but I am getting along with this one very comfortably), built-in wireless support (which these days, I think I am right to say, is a given), and a surprisingly robust exterior (the machine looks rather delicate, with what appears to be only thin plastic in certain areas of the shell, but it is surprisingly strong thin plastic!)

On the flip side, I have the following criticisms of the HP machine. The keyboard seems quite frail, particulary in comparison to the keyboards of other laptops I have used in the past. The keys seems to be very thin. Also, they appear to have a small area of contact with the underlying pads that connect them to the laptop. As a result of this, I often find myself typo-ing (usually missing letters, although the SHIFT key is a particular culprit in this) more than previously having not struck the key in the middle, but slightly off centre and therefore not registered enough force to depress the underlying pad. My second “issue” is not one with the machine, but with company policy regarding distribution media (which I understand might be dictated by Microsoft, and might not be confined to HP). The first thing I wanted to do was to see how FreeBSD or Linux would run on this puppy instead of the standard distribution of Vista. So, I immediately wiped out Vista and replaced it with FreeBSD. After doing this, I thought what would happen should I wish to reload Vista in the future? (Perhaps if I chose to sell the laptop to a Windows user). The machine did not come with distribution CDs which I found to be very odd. Anyhow, after talking to the HP support people they told me they no longer ship laptops with distribution CDs, but have a portion of the HDD configured to hold the distribution files from which the OS can be reloaded. Of course, FreeBSD doesn’t know or care about these files so they were wiped. To get the distribution CDs I had to pay an additional $16, and HP shipped them within a week.

These days, the majority of my computer work is done in either a remote shell, or a browser. Occasionally I will use a graphics program (such as GIMP) and a few other small utilities. But in terms of resource use, I would consider myself a light user. So, for my daily regular tasks the 3GB RAM and increased processing power has made a significant increase in desktop speed and operation. Has it made me more productive? I would probably answer this affirmatively.

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