Nov 15 2009
You know that feeling when you flush money down the toilet?
That’s how I feel now.
$600 down the drain on a notebook.
It just had to be done. The itch was too great and I just had to scratch. I saw value in what I was getting for $600 so I went for it.
I was really itching to spend up to $950, but I figured that the utility/cost function was getting pretty bad up there. I can think of so many other things I’d rather do with $350.
UPDATE on 11/18/2009: I am blogging from my new notebook and I have to say that I am pretty impressed with what I got for $600.
I picked up this particular HP ProBook 4510s from TigerDirect. Those guys just had to drop the price by $20 the DAY AFTER I ordered it. Unlike the other HP ProBook 4510s models, this one has a 1600×900 resolution screen. All the others are 1366×768. Although this one has a higher resolution, it only has 2 GB of RAM and 160 GB of hard disk space which is fine with me.
You know how with some cheap notebooks, you pick it up and your first and only impression is that the thing is cheap, that is, you can hear the cheap plastic crackle. Not so with this notebook. It seems to be fairly solid. The keyboard is also pretty nice.
The big selling point for me, however, is that this notebook has wake on lan and that’s not easy to find on a notebook. If I leave my notebook at home, I will be able to turn it on remotely and then remote desktop to it. If I have something on my notebook that I’ll need in the office, I don’t have to lug all 5.7 lbs of the notebook to my office just so that I can access it.
The notebook also has an HDMI port in addition to the standard VGA port. I do have an HDMI to DVI adapter lying around somewhere so if I wanted to I can connect my notebook to one of my LCD monitors through a digital connection rather than that crap awful VGA.
The notebook also comes with business level features (because it is a business notebook) that you won’t find on a standard consumer level notebook such as drive encryption and a drive guard feature whereby an embedded accelerometer will park your hard drive’s drive head if it senses sudden movement.
My only complaint so far is that HP, like any other OEM, just has to put a whole mess of crapware on the computer. Why do 60 processes need to load on startup and eat up 400 MB of RAM? I just don’t get it.
Oh and by the way, the keyboard also has a number pad on the right and that’s perfect for Tribes 2. And you can bet your pants that I’m installing Tribes 2 right now.