Buy this product from Amazon.com
Purchased and shipped from Amazon. Apparently is has also been sourced elsewhere. As per someone else's review, when part of the initial personalization had a pulsing logo in the center, I was mesmerized. The screen is very, very impressive, and Internet photos on HP's AOL portal were magnificent.It's big. Even the power supply/brick and power plug into the computer are over-sized.
I bought it because I wanted to be "wowed" -- I have aging HP laptops over 3 or 4 years old. (I bought them reconditioned direct from HP, because of presentation work a primary driver was name brand and a dedicated video card.) I returned a 17" lesser HP to Staples unopened as I justified the price increase on this model with more drive space, the subwoofers, and of course, a true HD screen which provides great real estate. It may prove to be useful in occasional presentation work as the world goes HD. I also have written music as a hobby using Reason software, and this has plenty of screen space, power, and hard drive space for 50-100GB of samples and music files and won't even sneeze. I don't have Adobe CS4 for Windows, but do own a Photoshop CS3, and again, the screen size on contemporary menu and tabbed software will be great.
Strange but true, my desktop is an aging G5 Mac (!) and this ALMOST makes me want to switch over to Wintel as my primary platform. I described this beauty as a "foldable desktop machine" to an associate. Time will tell as eventually I'll face the decision of a potentially serious change to an Intel Mac or see how well I adapt to this. (I gotta say though, those huge IMacs at Best Buy look incredible, but I'm spent out for a while.)
A few comments/constructive remarks: A backlight keyboard would be great. The way my office is lit, and I sometimes do presentation work in dark areas.. the keys are hard to distinguish and must be viewed dead on. I'd even pay a small premium for such.
Vista crashed the very first time during its boot up after going through the set up screens. A bit disconcerting, and I don't know whether it was Vista, or the machine. I've had one other freeze while at the log in/swipe fingerprint screen. I thought the latter a gimmick, but it is seductive in its own biometric way.
If you provide two headphone jacks, why not two earplugs? Literature somewhere may have described it as a Lightscribe machine, but it doesn't appear to be. Not that I really care about that or the media control, but we'll see in time about the latter.
Also, very alarming, was that my C drive showed up as 50 GB or so. This caused some worry. Fortunately, a good/lucky search term search of HP's site had a bug fix. Maybe it was due to downloading Vista SP1. The odd thing is, the bug fix worked automatically and not like the HP page described. All you had to do was launch it, and it did its job. You didn't have to type in parameters, etc.
I haven't tried the wireless yet, and don't have need that I know of for the Bluetooth, but it automatically linked up to my wired and wireless home office network. As someone else may have said, there wasn't too much junk to uninstall. I went with Kaspersky instead of the trial Norton, and loaded a new version of Home Office. I haven't had a chance yet to really push the graphics card or see how it responds with some of the 4 GB Ram assigned on top of the 512 dedicated. Time will be the shakedown.
Lastly, Amazon.com listed a rebate, but it had to be scrounged up on the HP website and wasn't a simple elegant link or form. That could easily have been improved.
That being said....Worth every penny. A steal. If you are on the edge deciding, it is really worth it and is a bargain in some ways. The value versus Mac laptops is outrageous.. this from a guy who really does need to use a true blue PC from time to time, not a Mac running Windows. I'm far from the typical user, but I love this machine.
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