My work issued HP 8510w recently had the type of hardware failure that
causes random complete lockups. No, it wasn't related to the memory, I
tested that. Much to my surprise, all it took to get it replaced was to
contact IT and tell them that it even had hung before even getting into
the BIOS. Even more surprising to me, they replaced it with a newer
model: I now have an 8530w.
Given that I've posted before about how bored and disappointed I've been
with HP laptops, I figured I should post to say how nice the 8530w is
turning out to be so far. For starters, it is thinner and feels lighter
(but it's still 6lbs) and more solid than the 8510w. The screen is much
nicer, but since the 8510w had a 1920x1200 resolution, and this 8530w
has a 1680x1050 resolution, it's not quire apples to apples. I do also
prefer the keyboard, and they've added a keyboard light, which while not
as slick as Apple's backlit keyboards, gets the job done. (And takes me
back like 8 years to the IBM X21 I had... ;-) While the 8510w was fast,
the 8530w is even faster, and amazingly enough, seems to run cooler and
quieter.
While they do seem to have fixed most of my gripes with the 8510w, it
does seem like no one but Apple understands that people with laptops
carry their power supplies around with them. How hard is it to
incorporate an easy way to wrap up the cord into the design for the
power brick? Oh, and for some entirely inconceivable reason, the power
brick for the 8530w is bigger than that for the 8510w. Yes, you read
that right: they made the brick bigger. I just don't get that part.
Oh, and Ubuntu (well, Linux in general) rocks: I got new hardware,
simply moved my hard drive to the new machine and booted up, and
everything works. It does help that they both have nVidia graphics, etc,
but still, that part was awesome. Oh, and for anyone that happens to
have a laptop with a new nVidia chipset and doesn't have working
brightness controls, the newest version of the nVidia drivers fixes this
problem! For users of Jaunty, I uploaded the Karmic packages to
my PPA, compiled
for Jaunty. (I can't seem to figure out how to make it so that it would
also compile the same sources for Hardy, but maybe I just haven't spent
enough time looking at it or did the proper RTFMing)
