The HP DM1-3200SA – the perfect student computer?

A while ago I did a post on how to choose a computer for studying but shied away from making any specific recommendations. This is partly because reviews of specific machines would date pretty quickly, and I didn’t really want to make this site into a load of hardware reviews.* However I recently got my hands on one of these little beauties:

The Hewlett Packard DM1-3200SA. Oooh... sexy.

It’s a Hewlett Packard Pavilion DM1-3200SA laptop. It’s basically like a netbook-on-steroids – small enough to carry around really easily, but with enough power under the hood to get the job done. The screen is 11.6 inches – this might be a little small for a lot of people, but personally I find the 12-13″ range to be the sweet-spot in terms of the compromise between portability and usefulness; it’s also only 1.6kg in weight. It’s got an AMD 1.6Ghz dual-core processor and 3GB of RAM (up to 1.4Gb of which can be allocated to video RAM) so it can handle pretty much anything you want with grace and ease. The 320Gb hard drive and 1366×768 screen are pretty standard features, but not bad at all. HP reckons you can get up to 9.5 hours from the battery, but 7-8 would probably be more realistic – still excellent though. The keyboard is near-as-dammit full-size, and pretty comfortable for typing. My only complaint about using it was the trackpad was a little small (understandably, it’s a small computer after all) and the multi-touch implementation (two-finger scrolling, etc.) was a bit unresponsive. It’s possible this will be fixed in a future driver update though, and to be fair I’m comparing it to the multi-touch trackpad on my MacBook Pro which is best-in-class. Actually, having any kind of multi-touch trackpad on a laptop at this price point is pretty impressive.

Which brings me to arguably its best feature – the price. It’s available now from Play.com and a few other places for £319 – an absolute honest-to-goodness, stone-cold bloody bargain! Particularly when you consider there’s a Sony model also available at the moment which has an almost identical specification, but is more than twice the price. So, for my money, I reckon this laptop might be the perfect student computer – light and with enough battery life to make lugging it to a whole day of lectures possible, but powerful enough to handle chewing through editing videos of drunken nights out if necessary.

Here’s the full spec sheet on the HP site, and here’s a more in-depth review from the gadget gurus at Engadget (they gave it 8 out of 10). One last thing – confusingly, there’s an older HP model also called the DM1 with a silver keyboard – don’t get that one, the spec isn’t quite as good – make sure you get one with the black keyboard! Also, if you do get one, the first thing you should do is spend a couple of hours uninstalling all the crapware that HP puts on it as standard – Media players/editors, and Norton trials etc. Ugh – wish manufacturers would stop doing that.

Happy laptopping! TTFN

*Although if any manufacturer wants to send me any of their new sexy gear to review, that would make me very happy. No? Oh well… worth a try.

Choosing a computer – Mac? Windows? Netbook? Laptop?

These days most university departments provide at least some basic computing facilities for their students, but most students also want to have their own computer for all-night last-minute essay-writing sessions and/or illegally downloading episodes of ‘The Only Way is Essex’ or ‘Jersey Shore’ (depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on) outside their university’s firewall. Not that I would ever condone or seek to promote such activity, oh no. Anyway, computers are cheap nowadays, but they still represent a major investment for most students, so here is my advice on the matter. All opinions are mine alone, your mileage may vary etc. etc. Feel free to flame me in the comments if you feel I’ve unjustifiably dissed your favourite OS, or whatever.

The initial decision you need to make is which operating system takes your fancy most – and there are really only two options – Macintosh OS X or Microsoft Windows.* A lot of people get very excited by the Windows vs. Mac issue and Mac users in particular seem to have a genuine and somewhat creepy devotion to their chosen OS. My take though, is that the latest version of both (Windows 7 and OS X 10.6) are excellent, and either one will do everything you could possibly want. I regularly use both and have very little issue with switching between the two pretty much seamlessly. Nowadays, you can even install Windows natively on Mac hardware, so you could potentially buy a MacBook and use it purely as a Windows machine. If you were some kind of pervert.