List Price: $989.99
Sale Price: $807.99
Today's Bonus: 18% Off
PROs: Absolutely INCREDIBLE light weight for such a large laptop. Setup was reasonably easy (except for my frustration with Windows 8 more on that below). A real DVD tray instead of a slot. Beats Audio = pretty amazing, customizable sound from a laptop. An amazing battery life (so far).
CONs: Windows 8 (more on that below) but this is overcome-able.
This replaced a Dell 17" Studio 1735 (Upgraded) running Windows Vista, purchased new in 2008 for $1100 a magical machine for its first 18 months, at which point it began overheating & shutting down suddenly whenever it was given a processor-intensive task like watching a DVD movie or running a full-disk security scan or even converting a single camcorder video or watching a YouTube video longer than 1 minute. (Bought a Logitech Cooling Pad N120, USB-Powered, Silent-Airflow Fan with Low Power Consumption (939-000345), and that helped somewhat, but still wouldn't allow a full-system scan.)
Since 2003, I'd always bought Dells but between that miserable experience and the fact that a basic Dell Inspiron we'd purchased in 2007 as a Christmas gift for in-laws was also a lemon, I refused to buy another Dell. My last 2 work-issued laptops have been HPs, and I'd been impressed by the reliability and battery longevity, so I looked at HPs this time around.
I need a large laptop because it's our only home computer and I do a lot of photo and video editing need the big screen. The Dell weighed close to 10 pounds it was a heavy clunker but I'd always just assumed that a large laptop would be heavy. This HP is amazingly light, and weighs almost as little as my work-issued 15" ProBook.
Windows 8:
I bought this assuming I could get up to speed with Windows 8 as easily as I have migrated from the first Windows, through almost every version since Windows 95 (plus all my employer-specific versions of Windows that are ever-so-different from what we use at home). Nope. It was PAINFUL and FRUSTRATING. Part of that is my fault I just thought I could "get up + go" like I always have in the past, from ancient Windows95 and 98, through Windows XP, to Vista and Win7...I just figured it out on my own. Nope. On this machine, I fought and cursed and wrangled my way through this new OS. Two weeks later, I finally looked at the Windows 8 guides that were pre-loaded on this laptop....umm, am much better now. ;-)
0 comments:
Post a Comment