06 July 2009

HP Pavilion dv6

This is a nice little laptop. The screen is pretty and it's not too big. It runs fairly cool (at least compared with my old HP laptop).

And the keyboard is nice. I wish is were backlit, and while I like the numeric keypad on the right, I don't think that I love it. With the old laptop, I was (subconsciously) used to aligning my right hand with the edge of the laptop, and I can't do that anymore. The touchpad is slightly offset to be more aligned with the main keyboard - a little odd at first, but not a big deal. I find that I'm sitting a little bit to the left when I use the computer so that I'm aligned with the keyboard as well.

But it's very nice so far.

New Laptop with Vista

I was planning on skipping the whole Vista thing. Not that there was anything terribly wrong with it - just that it didn't really give me anything that I really needed.

We got a netbook earlier this year and I was glad that it came with XP because that meant that "things just worked". This is partially a comment on XP functioning nicely (thankyouverymuch) and partially a comment on family members expectations when using a computer. "Things just work" and "things are where they are supposed to be". Changing to a new OS means that things are going to move around and I had no great need/desire to figure out where everything had moved (and then show everyone else in the household).

Well, my XP laptop is now encountering problems and it'll take a while to get it back in working order. In the meantime, I needed a new laptop and CostCo was having a good deal on a HP Psvilion dv6. I was irritated with CostCo for being closed on the 4th of July (how could they do that to me!), but not irritated enough to go shopping elsewhere for a computer. So I waited an entire day without a computer.

And yesterday I brought it home.

Vista.

Now what? Do I play the "I'm too cool to use Vista" game and install XP on this machine? Or do I go straight to Windows 7 and hope that the various upgrades go smoothly?

Ah, I'm too lazy for that. Let's just see how Vista works. I'm sure it's perfectly usable...