I finally did it. I bought a laptop before I headed out to California. Not so much for the trip to California but for another PC in the house and some more horsepower (a lot more horsepower). I’m not a gamer but I can always use a powerful processor.
I picked up the HP Pavilion zv5260us. Here are the specs of the system:
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor
- 512 MB of DDR SDRAM
- 80 Gigabyte 4200 RPM Hard Disk Drive
- 15.4" WXGA Widescreen Monitor
- 64MB NVIDIA GeForce 4 440 Go Video Card
- DVD+RW/R & CD-RW Combo Drive
- 54g Integrated Broadcom 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Adapter & Bluetooth
- 10/100 Mbps Network Adapter and 56K Modem
- Decent Sound Card with Good harman/kardon speakers
- 5-in-1 Card Reader
- Firewire (IEEE 1394)
- 3 USB 2.0 Ports
I dumped all the pre-installed software (of course) and installed the software I actually needed, removing all the crap that comes pre-installed on a laptop these days.
The thing I love most about the laptop is the speed but after that I thoroughly enjoy the card reader and wireless networking capability. The card reader isn’t 100% functional yet due to the fact HP is handing out bad drivers for it. I’ve pointed this out to HP’s Laptop Support Department numerous time and they just keep telling me to install the drivers (that don’t work) or the level one tech support fix all; format and reinstall (which isn’t going to do me much good considering I still need drivers for the card reader).
What I’ve been doing with the wireless networking capabilities of the laptop will be discussed later this week.
I’m also looking forward to a new release of a 64-bit Windows XP from Microsoft so that I can take better advantage of the 64-bit processor in this laptop. There will be more on that in the not too distant future.