Replacing Lappy
When I graduated from high school, I received an eMachines M6808. It featured a 15″ screen (1280 x 800), an AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512 MB of RAM, and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600. Pretty good for mid-2004. It has survived many miles on numerous trips from mid-Ohio to Flint, MI; Chicago, IL; and Jackson, MS. It was replaced with a marginally better M6810 (Athlon 64 3200+) in the fall of 2004 when the hard drive died. (Sometimes warranty repairs actually work out.) It has suffered from a flaky sound card since Thanksgiving 2005 (sometimes doesn’t work when you boot the computer up after it has been off a while) and a flaky Wi-Fi adapter since my trip to Orange Beach, AL last summer (blue screens the computer if you try to disable it before disconnecting from a network). It has also survived a massive milk spill, though it still carries scars from that day. (Luckily, my keyboard absorbed the brunt of the attack.) All in all, I am pretty happy with the time that I have spent with my dear old lappy.
Recently, I purchased the Orange Box. It did not take me long to figure out that the days that this laptop could run new games at its native resolution were long gone. I was forced to run Portal with all details turned down to get it to a playable state with decent framerates and no crashes. Even then, I discovered that Test Chamber 18 (advanced) was virtually unplayable when you’re flying through the air with four indestructible target droids firing at you. I decided that it was finally time to get a new laptop. (Also, my parents had been drooling over my laptop, hoping to inherit it to replace their Windows 95-era Toshiba laptop.)
Choosing the Laptop
The first thing that I looked for was a larger screen. I am a heavy multitasker and need lots of real estate. At the same time, I wanted a laptop that wouldn’t give me a hernia if I decided to take it to class or to a friend’s house. This lead me to look at 17″ laptops. Any smaller and you run into the real estate issue that I am battling right now. Any bigger, and it not only becomes cumbersome to transport, but also starts getting expensive to get it decked out to my specs.
Enjoying games, as well as being a heavy multitasker, I decided that I needed a powerful processor and a good chunk of memory with the ability to expand it in the future when I get more money. My current laptop came with 512 MB of RAM: 256 MB attached directly to the motherboard and another 256 MB that is removable. A year and a half ago, I maxed her out at 1.25 GB. Considering that I still hit this max from time-to-time and that my new laptop will have Windows Vista on it (ready to move up from XP), I knew that anything less than 2 GB of RAM would not cut it. At the same time, to move above 2 GB at this time is extremely pricey, with 4 GB usually being the only option greater than 2GB. This means that 2GB will be my goal, with an upgrade to 3 GB or 4 GB of RAM for a point further down the road.
This new laptop will have to last me for the rest of my undergraduate degree (only a year left 
) plus two or so years for my masters degree, so I want some headroom with the processor. Since Intel’s Core 2 Duo is the only viable laptop processor out there (sorry AMD, but the Turion just doesn’t cut it), it will be my target. To give myself the needed headroom, I will look for the fastest Core 2 Duo processor that I can find. (Quad core is too much of a price jump to justify the small performance gains.)
Key in game performance is the video card. Unfortunately, laptop’s don’t have too much available in this area compared to desktops. Due to nVidia’s large performance lead over ATI, I will go with the fastest card offered from them.
After being left in the dark with the lack of driver updates by eMachines (zero in the life of this machine), I will go with an established brand that I know actually updates their drivers and the uses parts that can be updated from their original manufacturer also (no custom stuff if I can help it). I also wanted a laptop that included a number pad on its keyboard. (I heart num pads.) This ruled out a few notebooks right away. I stayed away from Apple because I didn’t want to pay their exorbitant prices, especially when the only time that I would use the pre-loaded OS X would be to set up Boot Camp to get Vista to boot, after which, it would be good by OS X. While I get a discount though my school on Dell products, my friends have had nothing good to say about the notebooks that they have purchased from Dell. I was leery of going with a foreign brand in Asus. Gateway, just being bought by Asus, was also a non-starter. Toshiba seemed a bit high in price and I didn’t like the look of their notebooks either. This left me with HP.
I ended up going with their Pavillion dv9500t. I customized it because the base model was a bit lacking, in my opinion, and I found their recommended configuration a bit pricy. Here are the specs on this beast:
- Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit (will be replaced with Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit for software compatibility reasons)
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.40 GHz, 4 MB L2 cache)
- 17.0″ WSXGA+ screen (1680 x 1050)
- 2 GB DDR2 (2 x 1 GB) (max 4 GB)
- 256 MB nVidia GeForce 8600M GS
- 2 x 120 GB 5400 RPM hard drives
- DVD+/-RW burner w/ LightScribe
- Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN with Bluetooth (supports 802.11a, b, g, and draft n)
- HP ExpressCard Digital/Analog TV Tuner
- High capacity 8 cell lithium ion battery
- HP Notebook QuickDock
The only weak part on this laptop seems to be the video card. I would have preferred an nVidia GeForce 8700M, or at least an 8600M GT, but this was the best that HP offered on the dv9500t.
The total price on this puppy came out to $1997.98 (USD). Sadly, notebook warranties have gone up in price appreciably in the past few years. My dad got a three year warranty through Best Buy for my eMachines notebook in 2004 for about $80. A similar warranty directly through HP for this laptop runs a hefty $349.99. After tax, I ended up paying a cool $2512.33. Ouch!
Getting the Laptop
I ran into a couple of snags in the process of procuring this notebook. First, I decided to take advantage of HP’s 90-day no interest financing to get the order for the new lappy in before the holiday rush so that I could insure that I had it before I headed back to school after the holiday break. This requires getting a credit card through HSBC bank. Due to my unique employment situation, I was only able to get a credit limit of $1400 on the card, meaning that I could not fit the entire purchase on the card. After an online chat with a sales rep, I found out that I could split the charge between multiple credit cards. Sounded good to me: Put the first $1400 on the HP Store Card and the balance on my credit card ($5000 limit).
After digging a bit, I could not find any place where I could put in my credit card number and my HP Store Card number at the same time. A quick chat later, it was revealed to me that, while you can split the charge between two credit cards, you cannot split it between a credit card and an HP Store Card. You can, however, split the charge between an HP Store Card and HP gift cards. I headed over to the gift card page, ready to purchase a $1115 gift card to cover the balance of my purchase. I then discovered that gift cards can only be of a value between $50 and $500. A quick chat later, I was assured that I could use multiple gift cards on the same purchase. I then proceeded to purchase two $500 gift cards and one $115 gift card. Even though they are delivered electronically via email, you still have to wait a few days before they are delivered. Nonplussed, I went to bed with visions of shiny new laptops dancing in my head.
The next day, I awoke to three shiny new HP gift cards in my inbox. Oh joy, I though to myself as a headed to the HP website. I quickly configured my new laptop, just as I had done many times before. (I had been searching since this summer.) I clicked checkout, entered the numbers on my gift cards, entered my HP Store Card number, and clicked purchase. I was given a pretty progress bar telling me that my transaction was being processed, so I waited. And waited. I began to wonder if some odd combination of me using Firefox, blocking ads, blocking JavaScript, and blocking cookies had prevented the transaction being processed. Eventually, the page refreshed. Success, I thought! Then I read the red error text: HSBC did not approve the transaction. Crap. I figured that I had just typed in my account number incorrectly.
I went back to my shopping cart and started checking out again. I typed in the number on one of my gift cards and looked at the total to make sure that the card’s number was typed in correctly. It updated and said, “Gift Cards: $0.00″. WTF!? I tried another. “Gift Card: $0.00″. I tried the last. “Gift Card: $0.00″. S*#t! What happened?
I hopped on chat with a sales rep, who immediately told me to call the customer service center. Not good. You can never understand these people. Stupid outsourcing! I called and, sure enough, got a rep who had English as his second language. I explained my situation to him and asked him to refund my gift cards since the transaction did not go through. He then put me on hold to talk to HSBC. When he came back, he told me that the transaction had actually gone through. Again, WTF? Thanking him, I hung up, hoping what he said was indeed true. Later that day, I got a confirmation email from HP telling me that my order had been processed. Yay!
In the end, everything ended up going well. That is, except that it is being delivered to my parent’s house in Ohio (Go Bucks!) instead of my Grandma’s in Mississippi, where I am until the holiday season. That means that when my brand new lappy is delivered on Wednesday, December 5th, at 10:30 AM (EST), I won’t be there to greet it. Instead, I’ll just have to keep myself comfortable with the thoughts of the fun that I will have with Lappy II when I get home the Saturday before Christmas. I can’t wait!
