OMG !! LOL !!

I figured that since I now have a source of income, I would treat myself to something nice for the start of the school semester. And what better for the start of a school year than a laptop? So I decided that’s what I would do.

Well, that’s not all that I was going to treat myself to, but this was for just school, and that’s what matters.

First of all, this was my first time ever seriously looking at laptops. All I’ve ever used before were desktops that I custom built myself. It was a bit of a shock going back to having to work with limited specs because that’s all that the builder would do. The other decision was if I should get a custom laptop from a manufacturer, or a pre-built from some place like Circuit City or Newegg.com (sorry, have to give a huge No to Best Buy.)

I at first was going to go with a pre-built one, but ultimately became disappointed with what was included for the prices. I’m not expecting the greatest at $700, but honestly, why must they insist on using the Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chipset? Why must the cheapest laptop with any sort of good chipset be over $1000? I’ll never know, but when I saw the benchmarks and saw that they may not be able to play even some of my basic games very well, I became quickly set against that route.

Especially after seeing what I could build from some of them. For the same price, you could get a much better laptop built by Dell and HP. The difference? You had to wait a few days extra for building.

Long story short, I ended up getting an HP Pavilion dv5z with an AMD Turion 64 X2 Ultra, 2 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive with the AMD/ATi Radeon 3200 graphics chipset (partially integrated in that it shares system RAM, but has its own GPU.) For about $690, before tax (which was $54 oh I hate New York so much,) I can’t go wrong, and it’s a very nice laptop, especially since I went with the “Briteview Infinity” display option (it is completely worth it if you want the nicest display possible, since it gets with of all the noticeable bevels around the panel.)

But yes, I do love it. A lot. It’s not necessarily better than my desktop, in some ways it is, in some ways it isn’t, so it’s not a “replacement,” but really, it’s my desktop “equivalent.” Everything I can do on my desktop, I can turn around and be able to do it on my laptop with little adjustment. I can play every game that’s on my desktop on my laptop, and to be honest, that’s quite cool.

As for the laptop itself, it’s very nice. It’s glossy and is a fingerprint magnet, but it looks very nice and professional (dare I say it beats out all those boring Macbooks and Macbook Pros I see everywhere.) It’s got some good features, like 4 USB ports (one of which doubles as an eSATA port,) HDMI out (with sound,) dual sound out, a remote, a multi-card reader and touch-sensitive media “buttons.”

Oh god the media buttons, I don’t even know why I like them so much. Maybe I just like the idea of only having to slide my finger on what is basically a touchpad to change the volume, or to change what’s playing in foobar2000, or to accidentally turn off my wireless.

Overall, it’s a very nice laptop, I don’t regret going with it, and I highly recommend it.

Fun fact: No I did not name it “Lappy” on the network. I named it “Cheshire.” Shouldn’t take too long for it to make sense.

Other fun fact: Other things I have gotten around the start of a school: a cell phone (LG EnV2,) and a new prescription for my glasses (initial thought: transition lenses are pretty cool.)