Clogging up the Web

My ageing IBM T20 laptop had served me well. Costing about £2,500 back in 2000, you would expect it to last the test of time. Admittedly, it has had 1 replacement screen, was on it’s 3rd hard drive, had had the memory upgraded and the battery replaced twice, but essentially it was the same laptop (unlike Trigger’s brush in Only Fools and Horses - he said his brush had served him well for 20 years, it had gone through 14 handles and 17 heads). Not quite a Ship of Theseus in my case

The T20 started out with Windows 2000 and ended up with CentOS 4. It was a good mix at the time between mobility and power. So, these were the main factors I used when choosing it’s replacement.

I chose the HP Pavillion dv2104eu purely on a visit to SoundStore in Blackpool shopping centre. I always do plenty of research when buying anything, so it’s not like me to just buy on the spur of the moment. However, I was suitably impressed by the features / price ratio. At 949 euro for a laptop that seemed powerful and relatively light, I was happy to make the purchase.

To say I am not happy with the laptop would be stretching it. I am in fact very happy with it - the performance is not bad, the built quality is excellent, it’s very stylish and has built-in webcam, big hard-drive and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. But, the one thing that really let’s the laptop down is the battery life. It tends to last for maybe 2 hours if I am lucky and it’s forever running out of power when on standby. I have already had to reinstall the OS (Windows XP Media Centre) once after the battery went dead and the laptop had a BSOD. It’s only one grumble, but a major one. Switching to a 12-cell battery for double the life is a solution, but will cost money and add about 0.5 kilo to the weight.

Otherwise, as I mentioned, the laptop is very good. The built-in webcam is going to be handy for things like Skype or just taking the odd photograph on the fly. There are handy ports for USB (3 in total I think), Firewire and Compact Flash (and the other flash memory card type like SD and the like. The hard-drive is large for a laptop at 120GB. There are touch sensitive buttons for immediate access to DVD, sound level, etc. While stylish, I prefer tactile buttons as these touch sensitive buttons are fiddly.

One of my favourite features is the remote control. This is handy for controlling both DVDs and PowerPoint presentations from a distance. I find this extremely useful when I lecture in UCC. I can start up the laptop, connected to a projector, and click through the presentation with the little remote. There is a neat little slot at the side of the laptop where you can store and hide the remote. A very nice little feature.

The Media Centre addition to Windows XP is very handy for streaming via my XBOX 360 (Those who know me will know I am a bit anti-Microsoft, but you can’t argue with the best console out there!). I can store video and music on my laptop and stream via the XBOX 360 Media connector to my entertainment system (40″ TV, surround, etc). Very nice

In summing up the laptop I would say that the performance is average (the Turion X2 1.6GHz mine has is not as good as Core 2 Duo in the other dv2000 models), the battery performance is poor, but this is somewhat compensated by the portability / weight and the abundance of features. This laptop is much better with Intel Core 2 Duo, so if you are reading this I would say, go for the Intel version which has better performance and slightly better battery performance (due to more efficient Intel architecture). Definitely worth the extra 100 - 150 euro it costs.

Overall: 3 1/2 stars out of 5

Some other (more technical) reviews of note:
From NotebookReview.com (Core 2 Duo version)
From NotebookReview.com (Turion X2 version)

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