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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overall satisfactory, July 19, 2003
I've owned it for 2 weeks and I'll probably keep it. It runs quite smoothly and I've found no BIG issues although I looked for them and I am not a novice. Some not-so-big issues though:1. It has a dead pixel (a pixel on the screen which is always turqoise). Most people who saw it would return the laptop for an exchange but I am not disturbed enough to do that. I called HP's Customer Service and they told me they would only replace defective screens that have at least 7 dead pixels. A friend of mine had told me that Dell had the same policy so I was not surprised. The guy on the phone was helpful although he "registered" me as a owner without asking me first. 2. I've installed Linux on it and it works well now but I had the typical laptop problems: the "nousb" install option must be used to avoid keyboard freeze during installation; I had to deactivate pcmcia support which was freezing the boot (not fixed this yet b/c I don't need it); and, most frustrating, the ATI Radeon Mobility IGP 320M (U1) video card is virtually unknown by the kernel so I can't get any accelerated graphics in Linux... Actually the 'agpgart.o' kernel module won't load b/c the agp bridge is unknown. It looks like ATI/HP have not released the specs for this videocard yet thus there's no proper Linux support for it. It works with the generic "vesa" driver as well as with the "ati" and the "radeon" drivers, as a generic VESA. So it only ranks some 437fps when tested by glxgears - it should go to at least 550 for a "standard" Linux game like Chromium to run fine. Hopefully the ATI/HP drivers will come out soon! Absolutely no issue in Windows except for the disk defragmentation program that always leaves some data in the upper part of the drive so that noone will be able to partition it to install Linux (for example). I thanked Microsoft for a wasted half an hour to figure it out and then run 'chkdsk /F' to fix the drive and partitioned it immediately after that. The DVD/CDRW combo works fine, same for the Network and the PS/2 port with the classic Y-cable to accomodate both an external mouse and a keyboard. I haven't tried the wireless interface yet. The scroll pad doesn't look very subtle but it works. This laptop has eight visible blue lights and a green one, so it may look like a Christmas tree to some more conservative people. Speaking of design, I don't like the metalic net covering the speakers, and the overall combination of silver and black with blue shades gets mixed reviews from my colleagues.
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