My Vaio PCGV505DC2 laptop was getting old and the power connector was failing. I really like Sonys but I am a geek and I like to dig into the laptop and change drives, add ram and who knows what else. I tried to get instructions for upgrading my hard drive from the Sony website and Sony tech support, but the there was nothing on the web site and tech support refused to supply any information. This is ridiculous, I am just changing the hard drive. I have no doubt that I could change the drive without instructions, which I did, but it is always nice to have instructions to speed process along. This was not the first time that Sony tech support had been less than helpful, so I decided that I would look at other manufacturers for my next laptop. I bought a HP laptop about six years ago and I still have it, and we keep it in out sunroom. It is a good solid laptop, nothing fancy but a solid piece of electronics. HP has instruction on their web site for changing the hard drive, keyboard along with other helpful repair information.
I travel for work from time to time, so when I bought the Sony I opted for the 12.1 inch screen which allowed it to fit nicely on the tray table on the airplane. Unfortunately it was about an inch too tall to open fully when the person in front of me reclines his seat back. I swear that if only one person on the plane reclines their seat it will be the person in front of me! The Sony is a sweet little computer and I received many compliments.
My only requirements for a new laptop is that it needs to be small enough to fit into my briefcase or backpack and have good battery life. Any of the other features on a new laptop are going to be so much faster/bigger/better than my five year old Sony that I really did not care about the processor, ram or hard drive. OK, I did have to have two gig of ram and a 160 gig hard drive.
I went back and forth between the 12.1, 13.3, and 14.1 displays. Initially I was leaning toward the smaller displays but the 14.1 was the same height as my Vaio when opened, which is important when you are using it on an airplane. I decided that it was definitely worth hauling around the slightly larger laptop to get much more screen area. I also opted for the double battery, unfortunately it adds about an inch to the height of the laptop when opened but I can live with that.
I cycled the battery three times after I received the laptop, I don't know if it is necessary these days, but to be on the safe side and hopefully get the longest battery life possible I decided to deep cycle it. Anyway it took almost four and a half hours to go from full charge to 5 percent and I had a movie playing for most of the time.
The specs for the DV2500t are as follows:
Intel Core 2 Duo 1.50 gigahertz
14.1 wxga flat panel
Double life battery
Vista Home Premium
160 gig SATA hard drive
2 gig ram
Web cam
Light scribe DVD burner
Ports/Slots: 1 IEEE 1394 (FireWire); 3 Universal Serial Bus (USB 2.0)(1 On Left Side / 2 On The Right Side)
5-in-1 memory card reader
VGA monitor out port
S-Video outRJ-45 Ethernet LAN
RJ-11 modem
ExpressCard 54mmIR receiver
Expansion Port 3
2 headphones/speaker jack with SPDIFMicrophone.
I ordered directly from HP.com, but before I ordered I did a search and found a coupon for 30% off. This is after the price had been reduced $100 and free shipping. I also got a discount on some of the upgrades. The final price was $675, not bad. They built and shipped the computer in five days, I received an email on friday telling me that my laptop had shipped from China, and I tracked the laptop over the weekend and I received it on Monday. Impressive to go half way around the world in three days. I had the laptop on my door step in less time than they had quoted just to build it.
First boot:
I had to go through the normal setup and registration. As usual the laptop came with the usual array of CRAPWARE, it has a six month trial of Norton and Microsoft Office also Wild Tangent games. It also comes with Microsoft Calender, Contacts, Messenger and Mail. I am a big Firefox and Thunderbird fan so I have not tried any of the Microsoft programs but I will leave them on the computer for now. There are also miscelaneous HP programs for configuration, DVD quick play, and suppport.
First Impressions:
Nice laptop, it is solid and fast. When I purchased my old Sony I thought the display was much crisper than other laptops. The HP display blows away the Sony, the screen is incredibly sharp and the wide screen along with the high resolution 1280 x 800 allows for a lot of open screen territory.
I really like the touchpad, there is a scroll area on the right side of the pad and the mouse buttons take you by supprise the first time that you use them. All other touch pads that I had used have a very small range of motion and make a clicking noise when activated. The buttons on this touch pad have over an eigth of an inch range of motion and are quiet. I really like the design of the touchpad, the only one that I have used lately that I like better is the HP TX1000 series, the touch pad is nearly identicle, the difference is that the touch pad area on the TX1000 has is textured.
Vista
I have to start by tellng you that I am a Linux geek. That said, I don't hate Microsoft products, in some ways windows is much more polished than most Linux flavors. For example the wifi interface in Vista is light years ahead of the wifi interface in Ubuntu. In general, Microsoft has a more professional feel to it, that is because they have a division of designers that create icons, color schemes etc... I would guess that most versions of Linux have several designers and they are probably volunteer. There are many versions that have a professional feel- Mint and Suse come to mind.
Linux keeps getting better and better. There are many ways that it surpasses Windows, my experience is that is is more stable, and setting up printers and print servers is a piece of cake compared to Windows. If I was Microsoft I would be afraid, very afraid. Linux is maturing very quickly and closing the gap between it and Windows.
Vista is very nice. It has tons of eye candy and I am all for eye candy. When I first booted Vista it seemed to have reasonable quick boot times, unfortunately I was trying to get Acronis disk Director and their boot manager to work in Vista, and it is a a long story but I broke Vista by trying to give myself full administrative account rights, it warned me that the system might not boot if I made the changes but I didn't listen. I wasn't worried, I had a restore DVD that I paid $20 for when I ordered the computer, but it was defective. I had to wait two days for for HP to ship a new one. Their tech support was great, I just mentioned that I thought that part of the disk looked cloudy and they immediately sent a replacement.
Once I reloaded Vista from the replacement disk everything was up and running again but Vista boots really slow now. I have tried stopping programs from loading when Vista boots but I still get a black screen for over 45 seconds. By the way, thanks Microsoft for getting rid of msconfig in Vista, it is always nice to learn something new, when you shouldn't have to.
Vista looks really nice and some of the new features are great, but there are some things about Vista that are really agrivating. The start menu is confusing. I like the computer options (control panel, documents etc...) on the right hand side, similar to XP. The left hand side has icons of the most used programs, of course they are all Microsoft programs at the top. The really agrivating things about the Start Menu (or I suppose I should call it the Orb Menu now) is the "All Programs" section is confusing and the lettering is way too small. For some unknown reason Microsoft changed from having icons and program name to a stupid little yellow folder with the program name and when you click the folder, the subfolders appear blow the main folder. The problem is the items in the "All Programs" options are way too small, especially for us older people who need reading glasses. The nice thing about XP is the All Programs options would expand to the right as needed and they would usually have program icons to help recognize the program that you are searching for.
There are two other really bad things about Vista. The first is program installation, when you try to install a program you get this irritating dialouge box that take control of the entire screen asking you to either click OK to install the program or cancel to abort installation. I understand the premis behind this, it will alert you if a program is trying to install itself. Good in theory but irritating in practice. I am sure that the security people at Microsoft know that a program can install it self to the hard drive with out running an installer, if you want to install a back door on a computer you are not going to use an installation program to do it. So this "new feature" is only going to keep the most rudimentary of programs from trying to install on Vista.
The other complaint that I have with Vista is its need to verify that certain programs need to run with administrative permission. This is really inflamitory because if you go to Control Panel and User Accounts (you will get a nag screen asking you of you really want to do this, um yes that is why I clicked on the button), you will notice that your account is probably set us as "Administrator" , but every time you try to run a program that requires special administrative rights, you get a dialogue box that pops up and asks you if you want run the program. I am not making this up, I have been trying to get a program written specifically for our company to work in Vista. It works fine in XP but initally when I tried to get it to operate in Vista it hacked up a hair ball. I was able to use the emulation feature toe get it to function, I have to admit that the emulation feature in Vista is nice. I located the executeable for the program and then chose properties. In properties that is a compatiblility tab that will allow Vista to emutale and earlier version of Windows. In the Compatibility tab you can also select to run the program with administrative rights. I hope someone at Microsoft could explain to me why it is that I need to tell Vista to run a program with Administrative rights if my account is an adminstator's account?? The worst part is that even though I am logged in as an administrator's account and I have given the program adminstrative rights, but every time I launch the program the screen dims and I get the irratating little nag box.
I don't hate Vista, I am not going to uninstall it and replace it with XP, but I think this is a prime example of change for the sake of change, not change to improve the end product. I am sure the coders and desighners were told to make Vista more like OSX. The 3D interface (Aero) is not bad. The usability to be kind, is lacking. I cannot beleive that their focus groups and beta testers didn't say "these features suck". I know that they were under extreme pressure to get Vista released, and I think it shows because the interface has the not queit finished feel.
The one thing that I do like about Vista is hardeware installation. Maybe I have just been lucky and should buy a lottery ticket but I have an old USB to serial adapter that I need to use when go on the road. It does not have the manufacturers name on it and, of course, the driver disk does not include a Vista driver because I have had the adapter for four or five years. I decided, what the heck, I will plug it in and see what happens. This is proabaly not true, but is seems that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers have an unspoken pact that they will weed out old hardware when Microsoft releases a new version of Windows. Anyway I plugged in the adapter and Vista gave me a "new hardware found" dialogue box and amazingly Vista connected to the internet, found the driver and installed it. I was actually shocked, I was sure that I was going to have to buy a new adapter.
I was on a roll so I decided that I would try my GPSes, I have two of them, one USB and one bluetooth. Windows downloaded and installed the drivers for both of them.
I discovered that instaling hardware in Vista is not perfect, I updated a HP computer at work to Vista. Vista choked on the video driver. I went ot the HP.com and they did not have Vista drivers available for the system. The computer is about four years old, but it is still capable of running Vista. I tried to download the driver from Intel and could not find one on the Intel web site, so I had to install a different video card. This one was not an OEM, so Vista was able to connect to the internet and install the driver.
Installing hardeware and programs in Vista is really irritating, it goes something like this- you plug in the hardeware and Vista sees it, the computer makes a "ding" sound and a dialogue box opens and asks you is you want to install drivers for the hardware, you click yes and then you get another "ding" followed by another dialogue box that asks if you are really sure if you want to do this, you click yes then you get another "ding" and a dialogue box opens and asks you if you're really really sure if you want to do this, you click yes and another dialugue box appears, you get a "ding" and the dialogue box says this is your last chance, are you sure you want to install the driver, you click yes you hear a "ding".... you get the idea.
Linux is my passion. My fear with purchasing new equipment is always that the Linux drivers for it will not been written yet so it will not install or work properly. Unfortunately my favorite Linux version, Mint KDE 3, will not install on the DV2500t, it hangs during boot. Mint 4, PCLinuxOS 2007 and OpenSuse 10.3 all will install. I can even get the 3D effects to work on most of them.
Running linux native is is prefered but I have discovered that my new laptop has enough horsepower to run Linux at near native speeds in VMware. I tried VMware on older slower equipment and it was just slow enough to be annoying. Also, if VMware tools is not installed the video and mouse are really jerky. The problem was that VMware tools were only built for several of the larger distributions, usually not the ones that I was using and it was nearly impossible for a normal person to install them.
I honestly cannot tell the difference between Mint 3 in VMware (without VMware tools) and Mint 3 native. Ok, maybe the boot time is a little slower, but other than that there really is only one noticable difference, the mouse bogs momentarily when you shutdown/logout.
I had to markup some drawings (jpg) at work today and I have not loaded Photoshop in Vista yet so I booted into VMware Mint 3 and used Gimp and Inkscape to attain my final product. There are so many great freeware programs you can usually find one that will replace almost any Windows program.
Would I go back to my Vaio?
I really liked the Vaio, it was state of the art when I purchased it. I probably would not have bought a new laptop yet, but the power connector on the Vaio was broken and if I pulled on the power cord just right I could kill the laptop. This only happened once, but I could not afford to have my laptop die on the road.
I configuered the laptop pretty much the way that I wanted it. If money was no option I would have opted for the Nvidia video card and the 250 gig hard drive but the Intel video card and 160 gig hard drive are just fine. The really important options were Bluetooth and the dual battery.
As I stated earlier, I broke Vista and I had received a defective Vista OS DVD with the system. I had to wait three days for the replacement CD, so I went back to the Vaio. I was amazed at the difference, and how quickly I had gotten use to the new HP. The Vaio screen seamed tiny, and the computer just felt low quality compared to the HP. The HP has a much more solid feel than the Vaio, the screen is much nicer and larger, it is faster, and it runs cooler. It is really not fair to compare the Vaio to the DV2500T, four or five years in computer time is a lot, technology changes fast but apples to apples, the HP is the nicer computer.
I only have two complaints about the DV2500T, The first is just a preference of mine, the keyboard is too noisy. The keys make a clacking sound when you type, I would just prefer a quieter keyboard.
The second complaint is the laptop finish. The top of the laptop is shiny black with a funky almost sixties design. I really do not dig the design, I would prefer plain black. The other problem with the finish is it is way to shiny. This is problem for two reasons, first there is a lot of glare and it shows every finger print and smudge. The other problem is the shiny finish makes the the laptop slippery. When you grab it and put it in you briefcase it is just slick enough that you fell it slip just a little as you are tucking it into your briefcase. Now this is not just a problem that I have and I will tell you why, included with the computer is a special cleaning cloth. I have owned five laptops in my life and none have come with a cleaning cloth. The fact that they included the cleaning cloth tells me that they know the finish is a problem but they did not want to change it. Their bright idea was to include a cleaning cloth so you can wipe off the top everytime you touch it.
nally got sick of the slow boot time so I did some searching and found this blog. I am sure security experts freak out when they see blogs like this, but since I have Zone Alarm security suite I thought I would try disabling UAC (User Account Control). I do not recommend that you do the same on your computer, I did it because I was at my wits end with the sluggishness of Vista. I have also taken the added precautions of an after market anti virus, anti spyware and firewall (Zone Alarm) and this is not company computer and I do not have any financial info on it. I also boot into Linux when I do anything financial.
nally got sick of the slow boot time so I did some searching and found this blog. I am sure security experts freak out when they see blogs like this, but since I have Zone Alarm security suite I thought I would try disabling UAC (User Account Control). I do not recommend that you do the same on your computer, I did it because I was at my wits end with the sluggishness of Vista. I have also taken the added precautions of an after market anti virus, anti spyware and firewall (Zone Alarm) and this is not company computer and I do not have any financial info on it. I also boot into Linux when I do anything financial.
