HP Laptop - question and answer

A little while ago, I had an email asking about a few points of the HP laptop review. There's some good stuff in there, so here's the highlights. I hope they're useful for people looking to spend money on shiny new toys !

On the one hand, there's my HP laptop as reviewed below. The competition was a Sony, with a couple of interesting differences but sadly a price tag of about £100 more ...

Screen resolution : Sony has 1600x900, the HP does 1440x900. A bigger resolution gives better definition but more pixels also means the graphics is having to work harder. So on my desktop machine before I changed the graphics card, I'd been running Fallout 3 in 800x600 to give a decent frame rate. Running it at 1024x768 or 1200x1024 would give a sharper picture but the game as a whole would be less playable because the frame rate would be lower and jerkier.

Not too sure I'd get too excited by a higher possible resolution - the 1440x900 on the HP laptop gives a good sharp picture with the small text in the various Windows apps, with the text being where you'd notice the benefit most. More pixels give more dots per inch but there's a point past which the eye won't see much improvement.

Bigger hard disc : Sony has 250Gb, HP has 160Gb. I'm a bad one to ask here :-) My desktop's second hard disc has a 250Gb drive, of which only 110Gb is set up for use ! Big hard discs are nice but it depends on how much it's going to be used. My iTunes library is about 10Gb now and I've been keeping the really space heavy stuff off the laptop (I don't download videos ...) You can put more stuff on to a bigger hard disc but you can get by with a smaller one by uninstalling the programs you aren't using.

A couple of months on now from buying the laptop and I'm at 73.2Gb free of 139Gb available. I'm using the space so far for my iTunes library but I don't tend to keep videos cluttering up the drive. If I need more space, I'll be able to use external or network drives. The 73Gb spare is with Football Manager 2009 on the machine, although that's not that big a game in terms of needing space.

Who makes the Graphics : There's 3 major competitors for gpus - Intel, ATI, nVidia. Not sure about how Intel's newer designs are doing but ATI and nVidia have always been very close to each other. The HP's nVidia is actually the first nVidia chip I've had since GeForce2 days :-) Much of a muchness here, the Sony's ATI and nVidia will both be quick, although the fanboys will tell you different. One fanboy will tell you ATI are far better than nVidia and an nVidia fan boy will tell you the opposite. The way to really annoy the ATI and nVIdia fanatics is to tell them that both are fast :-)

Processors : The HP is the first Intel chip I've had for a while, I've gone AMD since way back with a 486 (well - I had a 166MHz Cyrix chip too but that kinda counts as non-Intel). Similar to the nVidia vs ATi argument here, although Intel have made strides lately with their Core 2 Duo which AMD are struggling to match. It's like tuning an old engine a little bit more each month adding new bits to make it go faster, while the other guy has his brand new fuel injected modern engine. AMD have been tuning their Athlon designs for many years now, the Intel Core Duo has taken the step ahead by doing something new.

The result - AMD chips always push their envelope a little further, so they run hotter and a little bit faster. Intel's have usually been more conservative. You can notice it in things like heat output, my old HP running an Athlon XP-M2400+ used to need to spin its fan faster when I worked it hard. The Intel based new HP barely noticed me running Football Manager on it for hours last night :-) (while playing iTunes constantly and running other minor apps)

Two months on - the Intel chip has coped admirably. The whirry noise I notice most on the laptop is not the processor fan, it's the blu-ray drive spinning up as Kaspersky takes a virus scan peek at the disk I leave in there ! Still having difficulty in pushing this laptop enough to get it warm. Could be an issue if I have to use the laptop to apply heat treatment to my RSI afflicted wrist :-)

On running games on a laptop : I've not tried Warcraft on there and only done a cursory look at Eve Online on the laptop, so I don't really know how they'd stand up under pressure. The HP has a useful little button that disables the trackpad. If you picture playing the game on the keyboard with a separate mouse and suddenly the screen goes waaay off in a strange direction, you've probably brushed an arm over the trackpad :-) The HP's tend to have the button that lets you disable the trackpad in favour of an external mouse. Handy, plus I'm not sure I'd want to be playing a first person shooter style game using the laptop trackpad :-)

Unless you go external keyboard, mouse and screen, I'm not sure that the experience of playing a "twitch" game would be too much fun on a laptop. Running a slow strategy game like Football Manager is fine, it doesn't involve much in the way of direct interaction or quick tapping of keys or mouse. I think for a Warcraft, a Mass Effect or a Call Of Duty (not got that, heard lots about it!) I'd trip myself up on the keyboard and pad or break them through pressing too hard. I get excitable with twitch games :-)

Important detail to look out for : TV Output. It's a royal pain to arrange a TV Output for a laptop that doesn't have it and it can prove very expensive and tedious to find a device to make it happen. The best option I can see at the moment is a Linksys network streaming multimedia box. So firstly, check for a TV Output, secondly bear in mind whether it's compatible with your TV. The HDMI output of this laptop is something I'll use in the future but for now, I'm unable to connect laptop to telly like I could with the old one. It's worse up norf with my dad's Acer, that one doesn't have a TV Output. The option there is to either use one of those Linksys boxes (£100+!) or to press my old retired laptop into service as a source for iPlayer and SkyPlayer.

Sheer size of laptop. 17 inches gives more screen space and a bigger keyboard ... But. When it comes to hunting for a bag for a laptop bigger than the 15.4" standard, you might end up with frustration ... The bag making market hasn't really caught up with 17", with there not being much out there that's armoured enough to keep a laptop unscratched. It's not so much of an issue for me a my laptop only tends to move between pooter-perch (to the side of the sofa) and my sofa-perch. If you're looking to travel with a laptop, a 15.4" with much greater selections of bag might be a better choice.

More pearls of wisdom to come ! But for now I'll close by saying that I was quite happily watching the France v Wales rugby off iPlayer on the laptop while West Indies v England cricket was occupying the telly :-)