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That took me all of about 10 minutes to find. Dell has been the best about providing XP to both businesses and consumers as an easy-to-find option; HP seems to be a bit less cooperative.

I attempted to install Ubuntu on my new laptop recently and after several failed attempts to find all of the right drivers (some don't even exist yet) I had to give up.

I was thoroughly disappointed with the capabilities on decent hardware of Linux in general.

Call me when Linux is ready for prime time.

The HP WAS more powerful if you maxed out the specs. It offered faster CPUs, a faster motherboard, faster memory, and faster hard drives. Of course, that system will cost over $10,000, but it's faster.

I've been setting up a few of these at work (small business and non profit environments where people actually use the oem shipped OS).

Vista itself is only a part of the problem, but these machines are actually quite horrible to use even after doubling the RAM from 1 to 2 gigs. Yes, I said a few awful things to the person who ordered them with 1 gig.

The "WOW" is partially caused by the fact the OEM installs are loaded with really bad crapware, and you only get to burn recovery dvd images containing not only all the crapware, but also the settings and users you created during the unboxing process. That's HP's fault of course, but does that affect stuff like updates taking forever to reboot-install? Dunno.

I had an all too similar experience with mid-range 2 gig RAM Acer laptops, too. Crapware, slow explorer navigation, and ridiculous update installer performance.

Hah, i also remember turning aero glass back on on both machine types, not having hardware accelerated video made just moving windows around the desktop consume ridiculous amounts of cpu. Microsoft-independent driver issues, I presume. The HPs had intel chipsets, the Acer ones had ATI. The hp machines seemed like nice units for portable laptop use, though, and they ran vanilla ubuntu live cds perfectly. Too bad they weren't mine.

Oh, so I guess nobody else's shit stinks, right?

Same guy that owns ::1

I like seeing the move to Open Source in quite a few projects, mostly Linux/HP-UX based. But if the internal company reorganization doesn't actually fix some problems, HP as a company is going under. (yes this is still fallout from the whole "who's leaking info to the press let's get their calling records" scandal) The only thing that is saving it from the ineptitude of the management is the talent of the onshore techs, otherwise it'd be dead already. The offshore "towers" are for the most part steaming towers of crap with constant turnover and a willingness to escalate a sneeze into a Sev-2 situation.

Ranting anonymous for obvious reasons, but I'm sure there is quite a few HP'ers who could of written this. HP "invent" your way out of this one management, there is no silver bullet unless it's in your skull. ;)

One good reason is that IE7 breaks HP multifunction drivers. There's a workaround out now (there wasn't when IE7 first came out), but, how many people are going to wake up and find that their scanner/fax machine will no longer talk to their computer?

I'm still really wondering what on earth a browser upgrade would need to do that would break your scanner, but then, ever since IE4, the browser has been your shell, hence all of our security issues.

Actually, $129 for a battery replacement is a pretty normal price. Skimming Dell and HP's prices for replacement batteries shows:

Dell Vostro 56WH battery - $139 (http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&category_id=2999&mfgpid=192404&chassisid=-1)
Dell XPS 80WH battery - $165 (http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&category_id=2999&mfgpid=167575&chassisid=-1)

HP's batteries are all listed on one page, and start at $129:
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/can.do?storeName=accessories&landing=notebook&category=notebook_hp&subcat1=batteries&orderflow=1&a1=Type+of+product&v1=Batteries&catLevel=2#bcAnchor

The only downside, compared with the rest of the market, is that you'll presumably have to hand your PC over to an authorized repair shop for a few hours (or a few days), or ship it back to Apple.

What sort of memory management would you prefer to have? Garbage collected? There are good garbage collection libraries available. "Smart" pointers? There are more libraries for minutely varying shades of that than I think I could count. That's what I, for one, like about the language.

For example, I do a lot of graphics/game programming as a hobby. For that, Garbage collected memory is really inappropriate (for a number of reasons, but most of all the need to release memory immediately with graphics hardware). On the other hand, sometimes I will code up a quick utility for home/work, and can just link in a garbage collection library to make things easy on me. I like the flexibility without having to constantly switch languages.

For reference:
Garbage Collector that I like.
Smart Pointer implementation that's good and general purpose. Roll your own if you want something more specific.

• acquire technology/products
• acquire customer base
• remove competitor from landscape
• enter new markets
• enhance/improve/replace parent's base products
• ...

However, often what the media/public freak out over (the ills and spills) and rarely do they go back after a (long) adjustment period and praise the benefits of such a merger. You point out one great example: HP/Compaq. Sure there were problems, and many continue today, but no one can say that HP is in a terrible place today, they are vying for first place in PC and notebook sales. Yes, there have been some major bumps in the road and much of what HP is doing today is different from their "heyday"...but where would they be today if they had only focused on printers and calculators?

Exactly, and don't forget that it is still very difficult to buy a Desktop or Laptop computer with Linux pre-installed

The key to finding "professional/business" notebooks with Windows XP is looking in the "Business" sites, not the "Home & Home Office" sites. Unfortunately, I've noticed most brick-and-mortor stores (even "office supply" stores) don't carry these real "business" notebooks (just "home office" notebooks at best).

The key to finding "professional/business" notebooks with Windows XP is looking in the "Business" sites, not the "Home & Home Office" sites. Unfortunately, I've noticed most brick-and-mortor stores (even "office supply" stores) don't carry these real "business" notebooks (just "home office" notebooks at best).

Yes, OS X is awesome... but give me a touch screen all-in-one like the HP and I'm sold: http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/cache/447010-0-0-225-121.html

Macs have a large corporation backing them. With the partial exception of Red Hat, any given flavor of *nix doesn't.

It isn't Strostrup but Boehm behind this (C++0x) with Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library.

c'mon man? only two cores? and you are trying to run vista on it, and besides that, trying to play mp3s?
It's time for you to get a real computer man, if you want to run a real OS like vista(TM).
Try these:
http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/scalableservers/superdome/
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/server/mainframe/products/gs600/

It's almost certainly standard RedHat.
They are probably running HP's ServiceGuard product on top of RedHat to insure automagic failover and the like.

It's almost certainly standard RedHat.
They are probably running HP's ServiceGuard product on top of RedHat to insure automagic failover and the like.

IBM pSeries makes Sun look cheap.

Plllleeeeeeaaaassssseeeeee. HW's a commodity, and what's cheaper today is more expensive next week. When are people going to quit just spouting this crap and actually do a bit of research?

Now, I admit that I don't know all the details of either of these, so maybe I'm not comparing apples to apples. Having said that, they seem pretty comparable based on other stuff on the respective sites, and they're all touted as "Enterprise class"...

From Sun's web site: 4-way M4000 with 16GB of memory. Has 5 card slots, 2 internal disk bays, 2 built-in GigE ports. Takes up 6U of rack space. $79K

From IBM's web site: 8-way 560Q with 16GB of memory. Has 6 card slots, 6 internal disk bays, 2 built-in GigE ports. 4U rack space. $34.8K

I didn't even bother to price a 4-way HP rx7640. At 17U, it can't possibly be worth the space.

Linux is not a great alternative to Windows.

Poor documentation

still command line focus

hardware compatibility issues

outdated GUI

hostile user community

server-centric makes for a crappy average home user experience

Oh, and lots of choice is not a good thing if 99% of what one can choose from is crap.

And still, no model number given.

So I went to the HP site, and picked a random HP Pavillion notebook. Operating systems supported are listed as: Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows Vista (64-bit), Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows XP x64, Microsoft Windows 2000.

You might consider one of these:
MV2010: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE592AV%2523ABA
MV2020: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE591AV%2523ABA
EX470: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG795AA%2523ABA
EX475: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG796AA%2523ABA


I have the MV2010 myself and am happy with it. There is a yahoo user group for it, a detailed unofficial FAQ by one of the people on the product team, and I think there are some hobbiests developing various extra (unofficial/unsupported) capabilities for it.

You might consider one of these:
MV2010: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE592AV%2523ABA
MV2020: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE591AV%2523ABA
EX470: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG795AA%2523ABA
EX475: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG796AA%2523ABA


I have the MV2010 myself and am happy with it. There is a yahoo user group for it, a detailed unofficial FAQ by one of the people on the product team, and I think there are some hobbiests developing various extra (unofficial/unsupported) capabilities for it.

You might consider one of these:
MV2010: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE592AV%2523ABA
MV2020: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE591AV%2523ABA
EX470: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG795AA%2523ABA
EX475: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG796AA%2523ABA


I have the MV2010 myself and am happy with it. There is a yahoo user group for it, a detailed unofficial FAQ by one of the people on the product team, and I think there are some hobbiests developing various extra (unofficial/unsupported) capabilities for it.

You might consider one of these:
MV2010: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE592AV%2523ABA
MV2020: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/PE591AV%2523ABA
EX470: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG795AA%2523ABA
EX475: http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/GG796AA%2523ABA


I have the MV2010 myself and am happy with it. There is a yahoo user group for it, a detailed unofficial FAQ by one of the people on the product team, and I think there are some hobbiests developing various extra (unofficial/unsupported) capabilities for it.

Given that most browsers are coded in C++, rather than Java or C#, garbage collection is a non-issue.

Here's where you lost me. Are you saying that there aren't garbage collectors for C++?

http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/desktop/desktop_hp/storage/1/accessories/PE592AV%2523ABA

Uses Windows Home Server and is essentially a no frills standard PC tower. Comes with 1 year support, upgradable to 3 years with next day exchange.

You go over the 1G mark just by doing uncompressed HDTV, and uncompressed is good; for teleconferencing applications, codec latency is the killer, since your brain is hardwired with estimates of other people's response times. Now, you may think that HDTV is good quality, but if the future offers me 64Mpixel HDR images in stereo (or better, with full depth representation) at 100fps, I for one am not going to complain. Multiply it out; that's approaching the terabit per second, and I didn't even have to choose any outrageous numbers—2*8k*8k*3*16*100 is pretty conservative for a convincing virtual French window. Contemporary video, even HDTV, is not enough like being there, as you come to realise once you've had a chance to play with high-end systems (my stuff: http://ultravideo.mcgill.ca/activities.html; my friends': http://www.hp.com/halo; both a few years old by now).

So, yeah, what you really want the terabit network to your home for—is chatting with your mum.

I wish I could show you even current research teleconferencing systems in operation... and they suck compared to what I'd like to be doing.

(I'm not, by the way, suggesting that there are no useful low-latency techniques providing moderate compression for when you don't have gigabandwidth—of course there are. I'm just pointing out that these numbers are not unimaginable, and that if the pipe were provided, there would indeed be end-user applications for it.)

What about these other issues?

6. Memory from freed or collected objects being broken into chunks too small for allocating more objects (heap fragmentation)
7. Semantics of popular languages (such as C++) making it difficult for a precise collector to work, forcing third-party garbage collection libraries such as Boehm's to adopt a conservative strategy that confuses some non-pointer bit patterns with pointers to live objects
8. Resources other than memory that need to be collected
9. Real-time collectors not being provided as standard equipment in affordable compiler toolchains for your language and platform

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/remotemgmt.html

Compaq has been using these for like 10 years and they've gotten better and better and cheaper and cheaper.

The only reason you should be in the server room is to physically move equipment.

I might suggest not buying laptops from Best Buy and buying business notebooks instead of consumer oriented ones. Better choices

I have a nc8430 which is now discontinued but it is workstation class and doesn't generate too much heat. Yes it can get uncomfortable if I leave it on my laptop for six hours with the charger plugged in but if I'm off battery power all is well. It has held up rather well and it gets beat on pretty bad.

Others have suggested it though and I don't disagree, if you need a powerful workstation a desktop is a better and more ergonomic solution. I have to travel a lot and need the horsepower on the road so I'm rather stuck but it works out rather nicely for me. Pretty soon I'll have a tablet and my workstation notebook that will be used for the heavy lifting at my temporary desk setups while I use the tablet when I'm walking about the site since the place is saturated with wifi it's quite easy for me.

My next addition to my current laptop is this multi-monitor adapter, so I'll have pretty much everything I need in a very small and very portable package.

Classic is touch, but no phone, Touch and phone is WM Pro. No touch and phone is WM Standard.

Classic is your regular PDA, albeit with a 624 MHz Marvel 310 processor, 128 MB of RAM, 320 MB or more of flash, CF and SDHC, 4" 480x640 ...

http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/handheld/PC/1/storefronts/FB041AA%2523ABA

Pro is usually constrained (carriers, you know)

http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/handheld/Phone/1/storefronts/FA990AA%2523ABA

is small one (610). There is a larger one (910) not currently listed there.

Classic is touch, but no phone, Touch and phone is WM Pro. No touch and phone is WM Standard.

Classic is your regular PDA, albeit with a 624 MHz Marvel 310 processor, 128 MB of RAM, 320 MB or more of flash, CF and SDHC, 4" 480x640 ...

http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/handheld/PC/1/storefronts/FB041AA%2523ABA

Pro is usually constrained (carriers, you know)

http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/handheld/Phone/1/storefronts/FA990AA%2523ABA

is small one (610). There is a larger one (910) not currently listed there.

The Mac mini's notebook parts allow it to be very tiny and quiet, but those notebook parts severely limit its performance/price ratio. A not-quite-as-tiny computer that uses desktop parts, like HP's s3200t series, will blow away a Mac mini (in specs) at much lower prices.

There is a link to this on HP's website:

http://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/HP_Computrace_BIOS_FAQ.pdf

Its a PDF.

As for Dell:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2005/2005_12_13_rr_000?c=us&l=en&s=corp

If one goes into the BIOS setup of a number of recent Dell laptop or upper end desktop, it will give you the option to permanently enable or disable Computrace's BIOS agent.

I feel the same way. Hell, you could get a full Compaq laptop for only slightly more.

Unless Asus cuts the cost at least in half, I won't even consider the Eee.

-FL

Can I install this on a free partition on my Windows XP box?

How big does this parition need to be?

Do I get a choice of OS when I turn the power switch on?

Will it run on my P3 450, 512mb ram, geforce 2 64mb? Will it run faster than the install of XP I currently have on it?

I'm curious: what backup method are you guys currently using to store those hundreds of GB? DVDs just don't cut it anymore, and tape drives beyond DDS-4 (20 GB) are quite expensive. What's left? USB hard drives?

What!? You're only having this problem just now? For me, at home, optical storage has always been to tiny, and tape always to expensive. Here's what I do:

At home: Another HD. For some years now, I've always bought twice the storage I need, an backup my data from one drive (cluster) to the other.

At work: Tape. Like we always did, since 1950. Quote: "Capacities up to 1400TB native".

I use one of these at home with an almost complete Debian install on a USB memory stick:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-89307-3341342.html
US$200, no fan noise, very low power.

As many have pointed out, if you purchase an entire system with power consumption as a priority, you can achieve a lower total power consumption. But for US$200, I've cut my 'check email, look up something on Wikipedia' power consumption by two orders of magnitude since I don't need a workstation for that.

I know they're not perfect, but the big three server makers (Dell, HP, IBM) all provide power calculators that give you a better picture of utilization than just base configs. You can add/subtract memory, disks, processors and PCI devices from the servers and still get a fairly accurate picture of utilization.

Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pedge/topics/en/config_calculator?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
HP: http://h30099.www3.hp.com/configurator/powercalcs.asp
IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/powerconfig/

Can I blame her for the HP-33S? Because I'd really like to pin that abomination on someone I already hate.

The 35-s is a fairly normal calc without a keyboard.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/215348-215348-64232-20037-215351-3442983.html

Do you have any actual real-life anecdotes or something to back this up?

It applies both to debugging issues in client code that manifest themselves as collector misbehavior, and to debugging the collector itself.

fascinating. How in the world does it handle an array of pointers?

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gcdescr.html

You might check out the Boehm GC.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/215348-215348-64929-314903-215381-1822489.html

That's where I got my phone from, or at least the UK branch of them.