Yeah, didn’t see that coming a couple weeks ago.
I was trying to install Windows 7 on my 5 year old HP Pavilion zd8000-ish laptop and it wasn’t going well. It’s still a pretty good system and has run flawlessly for the 5 years. But HP refuses to provide drivers for the audio and video hardware on it for any OS past XP.
Since I’m doing a lot of my work now in the latest versions of .NET and for the newer Microsoft OS’s, I really need to run Windows 7. So, time to check out what is available. I figure one good development laptop every 5 years is not bad.
My only requirements were for a 17″ screen, Windows 7 support, the usual ports.
I was looking at the HP Envy 17.3. It has practically everything under the sun for $1799. I made it all the way to the store to check it out. I hunted it down. I looked at it for 3 seconds. REJECTED!
That’s right. Rejected in 3 seconds flat. The reason? Canadian international keyboard on it. There is no way in hell I will buy another laptop with a Canadian keyboard. You can’t program on those things.
When writing code, you hit the backslash key hundreds of times in a day. And when you’ve moved the backslash to a new spot, and added a second one in an unexpected spot, your typing speed drops to minimal.
So, back home I went and started looking again. The guy at BestBuy mentioned that Dell laptops still have the US keyboard on them so I checked out their models.
I was looking at the Dell site at their different models. The Voslo 17″ model seemed interesting but had some rather bad reviews on the sound. One commenter mentioned the Dell Studio line which is apparently under the home laptop section.
I checked the BestBuy site again for the Dell’s and found the Dell Studio 17.3 for $1299. It has almost all the same hardware as the HP except it didn’t have some of the bad comments like heat issues.
It has a 500GB drive, 4GB memory, 17.3 LED back-lit display at 1600×900 resolution, i7-720QM processor, ATI 4650 Radeon HD graphics card with 1GB memory, Blu-ray drive which can also write DVD’s. Ports include 1 HDMI, 1 VGA, 1 Display Port, 3 USB, 1 eSATA, 1 Firewire, 1 mic input, 2 headphone outputs, multi-memory card reader, 2MP Webcam. Network includes 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Bluetooth, and b/g/n Wireless. In a word: COOL.
And yes, it does run cool to the touch, unlike the complaints about the HP model.
It says it’s not HDCP compliant on the Best Buy web site but I’m playing a Blu-ray movie right now over HDMI to my TV. I plugged in the HDMI cable to my receiver, setup two displays in Windows, then played the movie with Power DVD. On the laptop screen, I can continue to work on my code and write this blog entry.
As for the old laptop, I’m not sure what purpose I’ll find for it yet. It does run XP very well and I have all my software loaded up on it already. I’ll probably use it for testing my code on the older platform. Or I could turn it into a domain controller instead of using virtual ones. I’ll figure it out later.