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I made a visit to my local Best Buy yesterday. I had my eye on the HP dv6565ca available at retail stores such as Staples / Bureau en Gros and Dumoulin. I have decided to wait until late August before making my purchase.
Here's the scoop. The dv6568se is exclusive to Future Shop. The dv6400 series is exclusive to Best Buy. But how does Best Buy expect to make any money off these out-dated notebooks? I mean, these are old! Best Buy has a few tricks up its sleeves.
A very informative salesman did his job very well. He informed. More precisely, he informed me that, in August, Best Buy will be ordering more notebooks under the dv6400 series' name. However, these notebooks will contain all the latest hardware. More specifically, they will be packed with the Santa Rosa chipsets from Intel. We're talking about blazing fast processors, wireless-N technology and pretty decent graphics cards. What's more? These will be selling for the price at which notebooks in the dv6400 series normally go for.
I'm waiting it out.
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He's not that informed...
Futureshop and Bestbuy are owned by the same company, which is why you see similar items but different model numbers. Futureshop is commission-based while Bestbuy tries to appeal to buyers who prefer low-pressure sales. They appear to compete, but sales from both stores goes into the same pocket.
I believe the 6400 series at Bestbuy is the same as the 6500 series at Futureshop. Bestbuy now has the 6400 series available with the Santa Rosa chipset (look for the T2450 CPU as an example). The previous 6300 series was the older models that are being phased out. The model numbers are the only differences and are intended to make consumers believe the two companies are competing, and to also make it harder to do direct comparisons since the models numbers are slightly different. Compare the hardware instead.
If you check, you'll also find some 9500 series models at Bestbuy as well and I expect you'll see some 6500 series at Bestbuy soon.
And just buy whatever appeals to you - no need to wait.
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I generally avoid BB and FS for any large purchases because as noted they sell outdated hardware at exorbitant prices.
And based on what I've heard/seen about their "bring it in and we'll fix it NP" support, most of their techs know little if anything more than I do
Finally! If I wanted to buy an older laptop, I'd just go to Costco and pick it up cheap, who also give me a 6 month no questions asked return policy
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I'm in Canada too.
That was a typo on my part - I meant T5450 which is a Santa Rosa CPU.
I'm not sure about Future Shop since I haven't been there in a couple of weeks. But Best Buy has several laptops with the Santa Rosa chipset, including some HP models in both 15.4" and 17" sizes. Some of them are given the 64xx model numbers, while the 17" use the 95xx series numbers.
Weird numbering scheme which makes it harder to identify new models, but that's BestBuy/Futureshop for ya...
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HP support people are far from experts.
It is possible to install XP, but you need SATA drivers for your chipset because XP doesn't have SATA drivers included. SP2 has support for SATA, but you need to hit the F6 button during initial loading of Windows to select and install the chipset drivers so Windows can "see" the hard drive. Unfortunately XP can only read from a floppy, so you may need to slipstream the drivers into a copy of XP. Google for slipstream in XP for details.
Personally I would just use Vista. It's better than XP in many ways, and it supports the hard drive with included drivers.
And I believe Autocad works in Vista with a bit of help - google for details.
I can't help with directdial.com as I've never dealt with them.
But the model you're interested in has the slower 4200rpm drive. You might want to consider getting the dv6565ca with the smaller 160gig 5400rpm drive for performance reasons. The difference in processor speed would be negligible since the CPU sits idle over 90% of the time anyway, and it's about $200 cheaper.
To Canadian Buyers: WAIT!
Discussion in 'HP' started by ATR90, Jul 26, 2007.
