My two weeks with the dv5030us (long!)

Another newbie here with another first laptop experience Thought I would write about it if it could be helpful to some other newbie out there.

I picked up the system two weeks ago at Fry's for $1,049 before taxes. There was also a $50 rebate. So about $999 before taxes and after rebate. A little expensive, but compared to a stock Dell in the same price range, I got double the RAM, a better videocard and 40-60GB more HDD space.

Heres a rundown of some of the specs.

Windows XP Media Center Edition
AMD Turion 64 ML37 (2GHz)
1GB of RAM (up to 2GB)
100GB HDD (92GB formatted)
8x DVD+/-RW drive with LightScribe.
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M IGP w/128MB dedicated memory
15.4" widescreen
Memory Card Reader
Wireless, all the other standard junk, etc. haha


I really do love the hardware this system has. The screen is awesome. It's nice and bright and to me it has a great viewing angle. Very clear. Quicktime H.264 videos look great on it. WMV HD looks good too, but they have too much compression artifacting. DVDs just look great. Espicially with the right "sharpening" tweaking in WinDVD 7. DVDs can easily rival WMV HD, but not H.264 HD.

The processor is surprisingly fast. When running WMV HD at 720p, I've seen it run around 35% CPU time. My Athlon XP 2800+ in my desktop system gets around 65%. 1080p was around 80%, while the desktop can't run it at all without stuttering. Quicktime H.264 ran at about 45% and 90%. Desktop is unable to play either. I noticed 25% to 35% CPU usage while recording video with Media Center at the highest quality. The desktop gets around 80% CPU use with the highest quality setting, though I can't say it's a fair comparison because of different software (Winfast PVR vs. Media Center) and higher bitrate with WinFast. Encoding video clips to Xvid and H.264 is about twice as fast on the laptop vs. the desktop.

I'm not much of a PC gamer anymore. I only play one PC game these days. Unreal Tournament 2004. My desktop has an Athlon XP 2800+ (running at 2.13GHz), 512MB of RAM running at 400MHz and a 128-bit Radeon 9250 (yeah I know) 128MB. With everything set to high at 1024x768x32 with no FSAA or anything special, I get over 40fps on the larger maps. More than enough for me to enjoy. On the laptop, the frame-rate averaged the same. However, I ran it at 1280x800x32. I also tried GTA: San Andreas. On the desktop everything has to be set to low or minimum and I run it at 1024x768x32. I average around 30fps. With the laptop I bumped things up to medium and used two bars for draw distance and ran at 1280x800x32. Also around 30fps. Perfectly happy with that. I don't really play any games though, so I was fine with the performance. I tried it more out of curiousity than anything else.

One thing that really surprised me about this laptop was the sound quality. The headphone out sounds surprisingly good! I use Audio-Technica ATH-A500s for all of my listening and it didn't have a problem with them at all. It obviously doesn't sound as good as my iPod, but at least about 70% of it. More than good enough to listen to. Sounds great for movies too, espicially with Dolby Headphone. Could use just a tad more low end bass, though. That is one thing it does lack.

I do like Media Center. I like how it can control my DirecTV box. I can use Media Center to change the channels, schedule recordings, etc. I like that. Media Center does have a pretty slick UI too.

I also like the little credit card size remote control that it came with. It can be used to control DVD playback (if you don't have a Media Center remote), or Media Center. You can even have the Quick Launch buttons setup so the remote will control iTunes as well!

The Quick Play feature is nice. Being able to play DVDs or music CDs without booting into Windows is definitely cool.

Overall, the hardware and some of the included software is great. I love the hardware. It's a very nice system, espicially for the price.

But now on to the bad things.

Battery life. It only came with a 6 cell battery. I get around 2 hours of battery life, regardless of system settings or what I am doing.

Quick Play. It is a nice feature. However, it doesn't have the power saving features that Windows DVD players do. Battery life is about 20 minutes shorter using this mode. I've also noticed that DVD playback tends to stutter in Quick Play mode. To be fair, I haven't tried DVD playback in Quick Play while plugged into an outlet. Would be nice if Quick Play could recognize AAC files saved on the HDD too.

Media Center's biggest drawback for me is the lack of AAC support. 95% of my music library is in AAC format. I use AAC because it sounds better than MP3 and WMA (listening tests have proven this) and it's cross platform. It will work in Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. But Media Center can't see 95% of my music. This is a huge drawback for me and essentially makes Media Center useless to me, other than watching TV. This is also another drawback. I mean, Media Center's TV functionality is great. The guide, controlling DirecTV, all that is great. But with MC you absolutely CANNOT disable the "temporary recording". Which means you will always have a compressed and delayed picture. You wil never be able to get a raw, live feed of the TV signal. This means no connecting and playing game consoles. No uncompressed picture. It also means that as long as you are watching TV, your HDD is being accessed and used. Big drawback. The TV Tuner is also not recognized by Dscaler.

The final and biggest drawback of the system is that it runs Windows. This is just my opinion, but over the years I have grown tired of Windows. I'm tired of having to run anti-virus software, anti-spyware, etc. I've also grown tired of the little quirks Windows has, like the one I posted in the software forum. Windows has also fallen way behind the times in multi-tasking. Theres no way I would be able to encode a TV show for DVD in the background while still normally using the system. Not without a noticable drop in speed in other applications, or having to set the priority of that application to "low" and experiencing a significant drop in speed with it. With OS X you can definitely encode a DVD in the background while still using the system for other things without a noticable drop in speed. Maybe I've just grown tired of Windows because of all of the time I had to spend helping other people with simple problems that shouldn't occur in a "modern" OS, or the stupid problems I've had (like directory listings getting reversed in ALL applications and the inability to save the listings in order, or having the SP2 installation freeze and cause Windows to have to be completely reinstalled just because I forgot to disable Windows firewall), but that is how I really feel about Windows. Linux isn't an option because most of the hardware isn't supported.

Overall, I absolutely LOVE the hardware this laptop has. It's fast, it's quick to load even with a 4200 RPM HDD, Media Center is good for recording television. I love being able to use the desktop as a file server and listen to music or watch videos anywhere in the house wirelessly. But I can't get over the fact that it's still running Windows and Windows Vista is more along the lines of what XP SP3 should be and it's about a year away now. In the end I would whole heartedly recommend this system to someone looking for a great Windows based laptop. For me, however, it's unfortunate that time passed too fast and now I can't return it for a refund. My sister is looking for a laptop. I can probably sell it to her with the TV Tuner+MCE remote for the cost of a 12" iBook and keep my desktop for all of my PVR and DVD burning needs.

Good: hardware, some software. Bad: Windows.

Edit: I take that back about the sound quality. It does sound good. But it is only about 60% of the iPod's sound quality for music. It sounds good enough to listen to, even with good headphones, but it just can't match the level of detail the iPod produces.

 

you will enjoy an ibook...but i'd consider a 12 inch powerbook if i were you. the processor's better, the battery life is better, and if you go used, i bet you can pick one up for under a g. oh yeah...it also plays unreal 2004 decently...not as good as that a64 of yours, probably, but it's acceptable nonetheless...

bill

 

Hi Beaches,
I agree with you on all you wrote about the DV5030z hardware. As for the Windows thing i guess I'm just used to MS's foolishness. Though I must admit that I agree with you that for what the OS cost it ought to do what it is supposed to without problems. With 64 bit and dual core processors starting to appear I feel like multithreading and advanced processing should be a standard feature and not an option in OS's. But alas we get what we get.

Thanks for the write-up, I like my 5030 and will have it fro some time to come.

 

There have been success reports from people running 64-bit Linux on the dv5000z, dv8000z, and V2000z/L2000 series machines, all of which are very similar as far as Linux compatibility is concerned. I'd give it a shot with a recent distro like Fedora Core 5.

 

Thanks all for replying.

I'm still thinking about that iBook. I'd love a PowerBook, but I don't necessarily need it. I just want something small and super portable. I think the iBooks real world 5+ hours of battery life would do it for me. I would love to finally say goodbye to Microsoft. I'm just tired of the way they do things.

I definitely agree with you preach. A lot of things, like 64-bit computing, should be standard. Microsoft wanted XP to last a long time so they should have included the ability to take full advantage of any future (at the time) advancements. Dual-core and 64-bit computing were bound to happen, so they should have at least added the capability into the OS to take advantage of these features when they became available. Or at least included common sense features into the OS, like not always recording TV! I guess that is just another area where MS is behind. OS X can take advantage of old, new, multi-core, 64-bit, etc. processors. It's happy with whatever is in the system.

One thing MS really needs is a good "classic" mode. They need to stop trying to build backwards compatibility into the OS and just include a single software application that emulates past operating systems. That way you could run old DOS or Windows 9x software with generic drivers, or maybe even some hardware acceleration. Make newer versions of Windows faster and keep the ability to run old apps. What I wouldn't give to be able to run Mechwarrior 2 again

I've given Linux a try. But the problem with Linux is hardware compatibility. TV Tuner won't work. Not as easy to use my iPod with purchased music either.

I got distracted while writing that post and kind of lost my train of thought. I'll post more later.