I've been holding out for a new laptop for a couple of years because every time I configure one on HP's site, I end up with a laptop costing 1800 or more dollars. Finally I found this one for about 60 per cent of that and it has almost every feature I would have configured on my dream laptop. The I7 at 2.0 GHZ is very fast; just less than the maximum you could order for hundreds more on HP's site.It doesn't have a blue-ray burner but that wasn't on my list. It does have a blue-ray player.
At 8GB of RAM to start and max of 16GB, this has plenty of power for now and room to grow. I run a couple of VMWare virtual machines on it with out even a hickup. Four processor cores, hyperthreading, and 8GB is a lot of computer in a laptop case. I may upgrade to 16GB just to say I have it.
It comes with two hard drives of 750GB each. That's a must two drives on an HP machine. If you order a single-drive model either you get a model that doesn't support two drives or you get a two-drive model that is missing required hardware to install the second drive. Better to get the smallest dual drives than to get more drive in a single drive. This is a good middle ground: two large drives at 750GB but 5400 RPM so they're not terribly fast. 5.9 drive speed on WEI. But with two drives, I can replace the boot drive with an SSD and still have an affordable data drive. The dual drives was another must have for me.
CONS: There is one negative. It's almost a must have for me and I'm very disappointed that it isn't there. The ATI graphics driver doesn't support rotating the screen. Brand new 2011 model laptop with a 2003 ATI graphics chip. I sometimes turn an external monitor to portrait mode (long way up and down rather than side-to-side) and use it to display slideshows of pictures. You can't do that with this laptop. Neither the laptop display or any connected external display can be configured to display rotated. It's a significant limitation; every other PC I have had in 10 years, including all other HP laptops, have supported this.
In spite of the one con, and even as much as I have always used that feature in other PCs, this is a pretty good laptop and I will keep it.
October 21, 2012 update: I finally found a solution to the rotation problem. It seems to work to varying degrees for different people. Search the Internet for "Display1_RotateCaps" and "Display2_RotateCaps". You might find the instructions for setting those registry values to 1 or to 7 and for different laptops from HP but the instructions remain the same for any laptop. I set the value to 1 on my laptop and didn't try setting it to 7. For some, they get full capability. I never could get a menu option to set rotation but I did finally get rotation to work using the keyboard shortcut configured in the Intel video control panel. I can't do full rotation but I can do 90 degrees and back to normal. That meets my needs so I haven't gone further.
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