I picked up a HP Compaq C500T at Office Depot on special for $374 dollars (plus $69 shipping - more later) on August 4th. My wife was using the old Thinkpad and the battery no longer held a charge so I would hand down my HP DV6000 to her and use the new one.
I like the way the unit looks which while really trivial is important to me. Also I was ready to move on to Vista (which I will write about separately). Pre-purchase I found a good review of the machine here. My machine differs from this one in that I opted for the Intel Pentium Dual Core and upgraded the RAM to 1G. Good thing too, because out of the box just booting the machine it uses 780 megs of RAM.
The ordering process consisted of going to Office Depot, where you actually order it from Tech Depot and then they order it from HP. So at the time I placed my order my machine did not even exist. It took about 6 days for my machine to ship from Kunshan, China (apparently a high tech suburb of Shanghai) and FedEx ground had it to me in 4 days. That still amazes me.
The box arrived. A plain brown cardboard box with no markings other than shipping labels. It was the only box too, no box in a box like the iPod. Inside the contents were to say the least "spartan". One laptop, one battery, one AC cord, one power adapter and one booklet. No recovery DVDs. Sigh. Okay but for $374 what did I expect?
It had an 80 Gig harddrive but that is somewhat misleading (like the old monitor debacle). It HAD 80 gigs until HP put a 8GB recovery partition, a 2GB software install folder (on C:) of software no one wants, and lord knows how much space taken up by the installed versions of said unwanted software. So my unit arrived with 48 gigs of free space. A little more than half. Sheesh.
I decided to make recovery DVDs, which in hind site was a bad idea because it took 4 hours to do. First the machine copies files from somewhere (the restore partition?) to somewhere (I'm guessing my C: drive) and that took 2 hours almost.
It only took 2 dvd's so that was a blessing. I then uninstalled all the bloatware. Which took a while. Feeling satisfied, I check my free space now. I was up to...no....down to 42GB. Huh? The only thing I can figure is I filled up my restore point cache or the recovery DVD process left files in a temp folder somewhere. More than a little frustrating. I didn't find how to get the Yahoo search bar out of the start bar but I will. HP also has this app called HP Total Care Advisor which runs at startup and takes up a good bit of RAM. I changed it to not autostart. The largest flaw of the machine without a doubt is not having a spot in the initial setup where it says "Do you want to skip the installation of the free/trial/crap software?". This would be a big boon.
As far as performance goes, the machine is great. I was expecting a very slow machine based on what I've read about Vista but considering all that is happening, it's certainly fast enough for me. Keep in mind, I'm a coder not a gamer. And this is NOT a gaming machine because it has the Intel GMA 950 video card. I can't even run Second Life, which I use to prototype things and get feedback.
The finish of the machine is good and all the connectors are tight and snug. The quality of the speakers is really good and the in front position really projects the sound better. Fingerprints do show on the top (so when I have finally touched every square inch of the top it will match) but I can't see that part when I'm using it. It's a big laptop but weight with the 6-cell battery is tolerable. The keyboard does flex and feels thin but it works fine.
The screen is bright, and I like the gloss finish. Not sure how I will calibrate it since my tools are for XP but we'll see.
One thing I really miss from the DV6000 is there is no switch to shut off the touchpad. That was very handy. There is however a vertical and horizontal scroll area on this touchpad and that will come in useful.
I think this machine will work fine for 95% of what I want to do. I have had good luck with HP product lately and probably will continue to look to them first. Plan to upgrade the warranty to accidental coverage and pick up a 12 cell battery so my total out of pocket will be a little higher but still much less than most laptops these days.
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