hp dv1000 - hpshopping question ... maybe

First of all, Happy Holidays. This is my first post so I'm not exactly sure where this post should go. I've been lurking for several months. I'm a f-wallet lurker as well; so this being said, I'm also a poor engineering student at umich in ann arbor without a rich parent trust fund.

I'm not a CS student but do CS student things (don't ask). And I've been eyeing the hp dv1000 and despite the clock issues (which has been addressed I believe), it is still attractive to me.

I've seen it at a circuit city and really it's the size and quickplay feature that strikes me the most. Perhaps it was the height I was looking at or the angle restriction of the in-store display but its screen was really reflective and dark. Next to the Averatec screen, it was beautiful, but compared to the Compaq notey, it looked pretty bad. Go figure, the Compaq screen was beautiful, even being next to the fancy toshiba media laptop solution. This struck me as peculiar because the compaq (not the v2000 I don't think) was heftier and I believe only $100 more than whatever jacked price CCity had the dv1040us at.

I'm jaded because I need to save for books and food for the next semester but I really want a mobile laptop that can do media (the quickplay feature struck excites me much; not so much for the dvds of which i own 2, but for the mp3 feature). I've been hunting and hunting for a good price and HPShopping has pretty cheap through its APP program and a few rebates.

Here's the setup:

Intel P-M 725, brightview, 1g of ram, 60g hdd (4200), the 6cell batt, and the remote

and the price (drumroll)

discount -$50.00
item subtotal $1,363.99

I think this is before another $50 rebate.

I'm thinking of going with the 40g hdd and 512mg of ram but the above is my ideal setup at a price range that is a little less than reasonable given my projected winter 05 budget. But the more I snoop around in here, the more I am convinced that 512 -> 1024mg of ram may be the way to go (for laptops). My desktop that I built last year only has a gig of ddr400 and it does everything I want; even game.

My question is, have I been bitten by the dv1000 glamour bug and have become too lazy to look around for other laptops? (did i mention how cool I think quickplay is? ) I know of the bulky averatec model with a similar feature for dvd alone, but it's simply too big. Mobility is important and the dv1000 looked mighty tiny to me. It was next to a averatec 3200 which looked to have a questionably designed (perhaps better) hinge. Honestly though, the Averatec keys looked really cheap but I digress. I've even considered driving to Canada (I go there some times anyway) to look at the LG computers (I've got a thing for Korean electronics =P).

What options am I overlooking? I want something value priced, nothing more than $1300. I need something light, mobile, built well, something that will last until graduation (2006) without any glaring problems. Dead pixels are glaring problem so I may go with an extended service plan (something that doesn't completely screw me with some minimal dead pixel count). USB ports are good, FireWire isn't useful to me, neither is bluetooth. Infrared would be nice (I lost my tv remote hehe). I don't game much (which also has me in a vice because I built a good gaming PC in 2003 and I found myself unable to find time for games; feckin' engineering). I'll likely watch divx episodes of vintage shows on it and use Microsoft Office / Visual Studio .NET on it. I do webdev for work so that's definitely something I should consider. But I fear that I'm overlooking something serious. It's a lot of money (relatively); more than 60% of my current accounts.

Also, I'll be doing post-Christmas shopping so should I purchase before first quarter for sales or wait it out until Sonoma laptops come out (the new features sound pretty shexy), so that at the very least Dothan P-M's are cheaper? This would be my very first notebook and I want it to be attractive, functional, mobile, and still be able to afford food.

To be honest, I haven't considered AMD options, mostly because I'm a stubborn guy who has never had an AMD machine and doesn't have the money to toy around with it much.

Anandtechers love their eMachines for some reason but the hinge issue is a serious one. The dv1000 is popular in their forums as well but many fell victim to the clock thing. (I lurk anandtech too)
What advice would you give me, even if specifically for HPShopping?

By the way, thanks for having your site. It is a wealth of information and I've visited quietly every day for the last 3 months.

 

Greetings from EMU! (A UofM student without a trust fund? I'm shocked, shocked! [ ])

If you can, I'd wait a few months for the new Athlon 64 thin-and-lights, aka the Centrino Killers. This goes double if you're going to run Linux. Two are already posted on Arima's website (they make eMachines notebooks) and I'll assume that HP will have at least one too. Since you're at the UofM and doing "CS student things", I suspect you'll be needing 64-bit capability sooner rather than later. As an added bonus, you'll skip the Intel marketing tax. The catch is that we just don't know precisely when they'll be released.

If you can't wait, the Pentium-M is the only decent CPU Intel makes. It'll serve most people adequately until 2006, I just don't know about you.

 

Thanks for replying.

Yeah, since I've attended Umich, I've felt the sting of animousity from other Michigan people that hate people from Ann Arbor in general. I don't know what it is, I'm from a public school in the suburbs by DTW airport and I'm broke as a joke. I'm on scholarship here.

Anyways, I haven't heard anything about the Centrino killer AMD mobility processors. I don't stay too much on top of AMD news. I've always been turned off by their naming scheme and I'm not a gamer or lucky enough to afford hardware enthusiasm.

I was snooping at the Arimas earlier today. They look very nice but I'm not sure about under the hood. I don't do a whole lot of number crunching and honestly, I don't see how amd 64's would be too much more helpful in the since that shaving minutes off of compiling isn't as important as the overall performance of the machine in a mobile sense. (But I do foresee a lot of Excel in my future... sigh)

As for *nix platforms, I was considering waiting for faster/bigger laptop hdds to be common use so I can comfortably use this my "on-the-go" PC with partitions for more than one OS platform. (But to tell you the truth, Windows is getting a larger chunk, despite the fact that I may be remote desktop-ing quite often). I haven't found Linux/Unix useful enough to use on my desktop machine when I can compile on university machines. Linux doen't strike me as a 'desktop' platform yet for my uses.

Gosh, I just want to take this laptop investment seriously and not make mistakes I can't afford.

I am not dead set on any particular hardware manufacturer, it's just that the dv1000 is a pretty attractive and value-priced machine from a retailer I trust. (When I was young, I've owned a pavilion desktop in the past, and as far as compaq goes, I've owned a presario that performed ludicrously well). I am just sad that I missed out on the Dell 750 coupon deal. I could've been selling off 700m's at retail price like the other tools at my University.

 

I think you should wait awhile a bit. Before, I would automatically recommend people to jump on the hp bandwagon, but for this particular model, I think it's a safebet to let HP come up with a stable solution to the current problem. HP does have 100 dollar rebate for customerization on that model along with an academic purchase program if you are a students so you won't be missing out much if you wait a bit. For your budget and a pentium M processor is quite a hard task. I think only the compaq v2000, hpdv1000, a gateway, and a particular acer match this budget that carried a centrino processor. The gateway seem to offer the biggets value for the money but their quality have been very questionable lately. So I think it's best to wait awhile then pull the trigger around spring or so when there's clearance on the market. Good Luck

thietlong

 

I'm a native of the People's Republic of Ann Arbor. I can see why the Great White Father types and other "progressives" can be annoying. Still, it's home.

The "Centrino Killers" are just low-voltage versions of the current Athlon 64 CPU. Power consumption will be as good or better than the Pentium-M but with better performance. Besides 64-bit capability, the A64's can block buffer overflow attacks in hardware (WinXP SP2 enables that), which stops most autonomous Windows worms. Intel has better marketing, AMD makes better CPUs. I haven't bought an Intel CPU since the Pentium 3.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by brianstretch

 

My concern is that it is generally a matter of preference either way. I'm no Intel zealot, but i'm comfortable with them. And it seems like you're comfortable with AMD's I'd have no problem buying an AMD but i'm just not finding whats out there attractive. And the sonoma thing sounds so ambitious.

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by fsparv

 

Looks like the AMD "Centrino Killers" might be coming sooner rather than later:

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=20922736

AMD Turion 64, anyone?

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by davids