HP 17 Inch Laptop Deal
Buy.com has the HP DV9999US in stock for $539.95 with free shipping. This is a refurbished 17 inch laptop with a gorgeous BrightView widescreen display (1440 x 900), Vista Home Premium 64 bit, 4 gb ram, 250 gb hard drive, AMD Turion Dual-Core Processor, DVD burner (with LightScribe), and NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M graphics with 256mb dedicated ram (a decent video chipset for light gaming). There is one downside — only 90 days on the warranty.
I’ve been in the market for a new laptop, and jumped on this deal about a week ago. So far, I love it. The laptop looks brand new, with absolutely no signs of wear. And it runs like a champ. I’ve even used Sun’s VirtualBox to run Windows XP, Ubuntu 9.04, and Windows 7 virtual machines without any hiccups. It’s nice having an abundance of RAM for a change. Office 7, which can be a bit of a dog on low-end systems, is plenty fast.
I’ve also installed World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, which it handles just fine (with some of the settings turned down a bit). I even have some older Windows 98-era software (for example, Dramatica Pro) that I expected problems with, but it all runs great.
My kids were especially impressed with the included Media Center remote control.
Overall, Vista 64 bit seems stable and responsive. I’m sure SP1 helps a lot. I did turn off the annoying UAC (User Account Control), a big security no-no; but then I’m a pretty careful user who’s never had virus or malware issues to speak of (although I spend a lot of time cleaning up relative’s PCs).
My usual freeware tools run fine: CCleaner, Utorrent, 7-Zip, AVG Anti Virus, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, Firefox (of course), Songbird, Spamihilator, Download Accelerator Plus.
The DV9999US was definitely money well spent. I was a little worried about the size of this beast, but I’ve got my Asus Eee if I need real portability.
My daughter is just as pleased as I am — she inherited my old laptop. We can actually get her to come out of her room now.
