Hewlett Packard G70-120EA laptop

First of the toy reviews !

My last laptop is retired now, due to death of a thousand little faults. Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration but being dropped on a PCMCIA card broke the slot, meaning no more Wi-Fi. So along comes the new laptop. It's an HP G70-120EA, which means :

Pentium Core 2 Duo T5800 processor (not too relevant)
GeForce 9200 mobile (v relevant)
17" widescreen (not bothered about screen size)
160 Gb hard disc (not too relevant again)
Wi-Fi G capable (needed!)
Blu-Ray reader with DVDRW write (meh!)

When picking out the new laptop, I had 4 things in mind. Firstly, Reliability and Robustness ! Absolutely key. Desktop machines tend to stay put so they just need good ventilation to keep running. Laptops get bounced around more, so they need to hold together. My last laptop was a Hewlett Packard and actually survived pretty well, albeit with a group of minor faults that I could happily ignore.

Thing 2 - decent graphics ... I've reduced a bit but still play an unhealthy amount of games. You can't improve the graphics easily in a laptop, so they need to be adequate for your purpose. For me, that means something with a GeForce or ATi Radeon label on it. TV output is a curiosity here. I have a HDMI socket and 15 pin VGA socket but not Composite Video or S-Video. Could cause issues until I upgrade my telly to an HD as I currently can't hook up laptop to my conventional CRT.

Need 3 - Core 2 Duo. I've had AMD chips for a little while now. They're good but Intel have pushed the boundaries a bit further than AMD could do. Things may change again in 6 months :-)

Essential 4 - Power Socket ! When I'm gaming, my laptop is pushed up against the side of the sofa, which means if the power socket was on the right hand side, it would clash with the sofa. Not good. The socket is on the left, which means this laptop is fine. (My sister's Toshiba has it on the right, so it would be trickier to accommodate it here). It's a detail thing but the silly little details can be make or break.

There's a few other items in that spec that I haven't marked "Essential" - why is that ? There's so much choice now that I pick out a few specifics to choose by and pretty much ignore the other differences.
17" widescreen - big screen is nice but small screens do just as well. Although I did exclude the new tiny notebooks because I don't think I'd get on with their keyboards.
Wifi N - Wifi B/G is pretty much standard now and give the performance any home network will require. Hell ! My old laptop wasn't capable of using WiFi G to the full because its hard disc was too slow ! Wifi G can do 54Mbps, that hard disc could pump out 33Mbps. The wireless link between iTunes and the Airport Express is using 1 Mbit/s to stream audio, so wireless N is a luxury that isn't really needed. Despite what a certain computer shopping magazine may say, you can stream video over WiFi G. (BBC iPlayer from the internet over a 8Mbps link)
Blu-Ray drive - meh. Nice to have the capability but ... small screen and how are you going to get the audio to surround sound speakers ? A classy Blu-Ray standalone drive will cost you £160. (Sony's BDPS350)
Memory - don't settle for less than 2Gb in a new machine, apart from that - memory hugeness isn't too relevant unless you're video editing.

Urk - been saying about choosing laptops and not saying anything about what I think of this one ! Here goes :

First impressions :

Not much manual but then you don't really need one. There's a cardboard thing with pictures that tells you how to put the battery in and that's all that's really needed. Boot it up and you get Vista's opening sequences. A short time later and you're looking at Vista's interface. Not much to be afraid of here.

Wifi connected up ok, although I did need to reset my router (blaming the router) before it would see the internet. The connection to the router itself is now rock solid stable and supports 1Mbit/s worth of continuous streaming of iTunes music to remote speakers.

Screen quality is very good, allowing a native resolution of 1440x960. It's brighter than I need and nice and sharp. On testing with Eve Online, graphics chip and screen kept up with the pretty pictures as I took a spaceship from station to stargate and back again. Very Satisfactory.

Sound isn't so good. I suspect there's a driver issue at work here as iTunes will jump and skip a bit when playing songs over the laptop speakers, this doesn't happen on the Airport link. They're Altec Lansing hardware like my old HP laptop but the sound quality isn't as good. Passable.

It's a Vista machine and I've actually been pleasantly surprised there. Vista's earned itself a very bad reputation in techie circles due to the changes made under the skin. I approached it with an open mind and as I mention above, I'm preferring it to WinXP. Looks like a big effort has been made to improve usability and user friendliness. That comes at a cost of the geeky parts being harder to find but for day to day usage, is that such a hardship ? The objective of a good computer setup is that you turn it on and do what you want with it, instead of fighting it like in the Win98 days.

Muahaha - will have to see if my opinion of Vista changes after the honeymoon period wears off ! It's still in honeymoon, as it's done everything I've asked of it so far.

Extras - there's a few bits of software with the package. Things like a small heap of games (I'm a Mahjongg addict) plus you get a 60 day trial period for Office 2007. Enough time for you to get used to it before it runs out. I'll be acquiring Office 2007 in due course through a work's deal. A Norton trial is also on the machine, which actually removed itself easily on command. Current antivirus is Avira, to be replaced by Kaspersky when it becomes economic to get a 3 PC licence. Not tried Cyberlink's DVD suite, although that's here too.

Soo - would I recommend this laptop to other people ? Hell yeah :-) There's two acid tests of a successful PC upgrade :

1 - Does it provide an improvement worth the money. I have to say Yes here as the wifi lets me stream iTunes music to the remote speakers. And that quality of life improvement is IMHO worth the cash. Another boost is that I can now change skill on Eve without needing to reboot my desktop machine. My old laptop could open the Classic (graphics-lite) version of Eve but tended to need a reboot due to a software problem that would have needed a back-to-factory-settings reinstall.

2 - Do you start thinking "Oh bother, shoulda got the other model" after you've bought the toy. Still happy with what I've got here, the only downer I can think of is the weak speakers. Apart from the interesting time I'll have finding a bag big enough to put it in, there are no other sore thumbs. Not even a noisy fan. I've not pushed it too hard yet but it's been absolutely silent so far.

Summary :
A very competent, capable and smooth running laptop, let down just a little by weak sound. Has slotted into my domestic network very nicely.

Luxury or Austere ?
This laptop is probably better than I needed. If you're not insisting on the graphics hardware, then that particular aspect is a definite luxury. The price was good though :-)