Just ordered a DV2000T

I am a little worried about whether I made the right purchase for the laptop. I got the Core 2 Duo T7200, Geforce 7200Go, 2 gig ram (cheaper than buying 2 gig from Newegg ;p), 80 gig hard drive, etc for $1150 after AP+coupon discounts (+ add $99 for Tax, go Texas).

For the price, the HP appears to be a better buy than most of the competitors, but the video card is rather weak and I wish the WSXGA+ of 1440xwhatever was offered. I'm primarily going to use the laptop for lab work & presentations (or only for browsing the internet according to my PI ;p), some picture editing & video encoding, and multimedia playback features. However, it would be nice to be able to play some semi current games like Guild Wars. So do you think this laptop would be a good fit? My main issue is the screen size and the video, but all the competitor laptops are either too expensive, worse build quality, or lack the finesse and cool extras of the DV series like the Quickplay, built-in cam, and the media remote. Dell has many comparable features, but I don't really like their design and their components do not seem as high quality nowdays aside from the XPS line.

I am switching over from my old X1000 presario laptop. I am thinking a smaller form factor would be more useful to me to add portability. But I will sure miss the 15.4 inch screen and WSXGA+ 1680x1050 resolution. Anyone want to share their experience going from 15.4 inch XGA+ down to a low res 14.1?

It would have been nice if the included GPU was slightly more powerful - is Vista+aeroglass still relatively smooth with the Geforce 7200? I rarely played games on my old laptop due to the crappy video card (radeon 9200), and I dont really see the Geforce 7200 as too much of an improvement.

Oh one final question - how likelihood is it to get a crappy LCD screen when you custom order? Is there any manufacturer that I shouldn't even bother trying and just return the laptop the next day?

Thanks for any advice.

 

I own a dv2000, and I think you'll enjoy the notebook. The Core 2 Duo should fit your needs well, and I think the notebooks are built quite well.

I am switching over from my old X1000 presario laptop. I am thinking a smaller form factor would be more useful to me to add portability. But I will sure miss the 15.4 inch screen and WSXGA+ 1680x1050 resolution. Anyone want to share their experience going from 15.4 inch XGA+ down to a low res 14.1?

I did that last year, and it really wasn't much of a change, in my view.

Oh one final question - how likelihood is it to get a crappy LCD screen when you custom order? Is there any manufacturer that I shouldn't even bother trying and just return the laptop the next day?

SEC and CM screens are the ones you want to avoid.

QDS and AUO, perhaps even LPL, are the screens you want to go with.



Hope this helps.

 

i'm also considering a dv2000t. and i'd also like to know the answer to some of your questions Reinhardt; I'm also wondering how well that graphics card would do with "semi-current" games (in my case like kotor, COD2, fable, etc.)...

also, Reindhart, what kind of ram does the dv2000 use, (like if i were to check it on newegg) is it DDR2 667-PC2 5300, or 5400.. or DDR2 553-PC2 4200?

 

What are AP+coupon discounts? That's not a bad price at all.
IIRC, they ship it w/ DDR2-533, but it can use up to DDR2-667...

 

You need to hit $1300 pre-rebate (which adding 2 gig memory will likely do for you). The coupon is: 15% off $1299 on any customizable HP Pavilion Notebook NB9500

The AP discount was another $100 or so off the initial price before anything else was calculated (AP brought notebook down to slightly above $1400 and was 200ish off with the NB9500 coupon).

Finally, there is the $50 mail in rebate on HP's site that all laptops seem to be getting. So my price was 1199 - 50 mail in rebate = ~1150 + $99 tax

A nice price for all that is included, a comparable Dell would probably be at least $1400 without tax (or in the 1800+ range for XPS line).




Also, thanks for the input Jon-Michael. I am starting to feel like the laptop was the right choice, now I just hope I get a good screen.

 

You got an awesome deal, but can you please show me how to get the app discount to work with the coupon code? I config the computer to more than 1300 before discounts, but still it would not work.

 

I'm also curious to know how you made the APP discount work with the NB9500 coupon.

 

As for the order in which I did things - I originally put together my DV2000 order in the cart and only applied the NB9500 coupon without logging in to my account (I forgot I already had an account from my X1000 order). Then I realized I forgot to log in, which would then include my APP discount. I don't know if you have to "use" the NB9500 first to get them to stack, but that seems counterintuitive. More likely it is some sort of webpage error on HP's part.

If you can't get it to work, you can try calling customer service and see if they will work with you. It definitely allowed me to combine them on my October 10th order.

However, I am not entirely sure what's going on here - I ordered my DV2000T with APP and NB9500 on Oct 10, and on Oct 11th I was thinking about getting the DV6000 instead of the 2000 line. I went ahead and selected a DV6000T machine to my shopping cart to check the final pricing. It would no longer let me combine the NB9500 with APP for the DV6000T. Go figure.





Oh yeah, on a totally unrelated note, has anyone tried the DV2000T with Vista and aero-glass?? I really want to be able to run the Ultimate version of Vista with full aero-glass capabilities at a good speed. I am worried that the Geforce 7200 only has 32 megs of dedicated memory and the rest is hypermemory or whatever it is called, which could degrade the performance.

 

mine dv2000t was delivered with 667MHz RAM

 

the new DV2000T comes with ddr2 667, I had a different route for getting the rams and it was the same price but with 2gigs Corsairs rams. Congrats on your buy. EPP or APP is stackable with other discounts.

 

how do we check if it is 667MHz Ram?

 

I have the DV2000T with Core Duo 1.66 (Not Core Due 2). I have 1.25GB Ram and 120 GB Hard Drive. I installed Vista RC-1 and Aero features work without issue, and I am just using the integrated Intel Graphics Accelerator. I'm impressed overall with the ease Vista installed. I only needed to install the sound card driver, for which I used the XP driver and it worked fine. The rest was recognized during the install.

 

Use CPU-Z
http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

Do remember though that the actual clock speed of 667MHz RAM is 333MHz since they are double data rate memory.

 

How do u choose which display you get LG or qds?

 

Mmm, by returning it over... and over... HP will not let you choose. An overseas HP crew told me otherwise, but were talking out of their hats.