Chris’s New HP Pavilion zv5260us Laptop
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I finally did it. I bought a laptop before I headed out to California. Not so much for the trip to California but for another PC in the house and some more horsepower (a lot more horsepower). I’m not a gamer but I can always use a powerful processor.
I picked up the HP Pavilion zv5260us. Here are the specs of the system:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor
512 MB of DDR SDRAM
80 Gigabyte 4200 RPM Hard Disk Drive
15.4″ WXGA Widescreen Monitor
64MB NVIDIA GeForce 4 440 Go Video Card
DVD+RW/R & CD-RW Combo Drive
54g Integrated Broadcom 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Adapter & Bluetooth
10/100 Mbps Network Adapter and 56K Modem
Decent Sound Card with Good harman/kardon speakers
5-in-1 Card Reader
Firewire (IEEE 1394)
3 USB 2.0 Ports
I dumped all the pre-installed software (of course) and installed the software I actually needed, removing all the crap that comes pre-installed on a laptop these days.
The thing I love most about the laptop is the speed but after that I thoroughly enjoy the card reader and wireless networking capability. The card reader isn’t 100% functional yet due to the fact HP is handing out bad drivers for it. I’ve pointed this out to HP’s Laptop Support Department numerous time and they just keep telling me to install the drivers (that don’t work) or the level one tech support fix all; format and reinstall (which isn’t going to do me much good considering I still need drivers for the card reader).
What I’ve been doing with the wireless networking capabilities of the laptop will be discussed later this week.
I’m also looking forward to a new release of a 64-bit Windows XP from Microsoft so that I can take better advantage of the 64-bit processor in this laptop. There will be more on that in the not too distant future.
3 Comments
Lockergnome's IT Professionals
August 23rd, 2004
at 4:20am
Let’s Talk About Wireless Security
I’m sitting in front of my laptop in a hotel room in California and decided to see if I have any kind of wireless network available to me. I turn on my wireless network adapter and low and behold NetStumbler…
dan
September 25th, 2004
at 8:58pm
In the meantime while waiting for a 64-bit version of WindowsXP, if you are so brave, get a copy of SuSE 9.1 professional. It screams on this laptop, and takes full advantage of the 64 bit processor, NVidia chip, etc… The only thing I haven’t gotten working yet in Linux too, is the card reader, which really is no big deal, I’ll use USB for my camera, as I always have. SuSE set’s up just about everything automatically. I had to do a bit of tweaking to get the display into 1280×800 mode (had to tell SuSE I had a dell 1280x LCD display, and manually create the resolution). Also, it doesn’t come with 3D enabled by default on the nvidia card, that is available as a free upgrade (license issue). Once it’s all set up though, stand back, I didn’t know what I was missing until I got it going. X seems to operate completely with 3D acceleration, meaning even moving windows around seems to behave like a 3D accelerated event.
Our Life
February 13th, 2005
at 10:04am
What Have I Been Doing, Where Have I Been Hiding
Our Life has gone rather dormant lately for good reason. It’s been a very hectic time for Carri, Aubree, and I. 1) Carri separated from the Air Force on 1 Feb 05 and has found a job… in North Carolina….