Advice Needed on Ordering dv8000t

My advice...

DON'T DO IT!!! Find another brand!

1. For what you are going to be using it for I would say go with the 5400RPM drive, if you all ready can tell that you are seeing a minimal increase in performance using the 7200RPM drive there isn’t any need for you to have it.

2. If you are technically inclined or willing to give it a shot you could add the second hard drive on your own. I didn’t want to mess with it so I order my dv9000 with 2 HDD’s. You can get the bracket for a second drive for around $30 from a company that advertises on this site, so you might be able to save yourself some money doing it at home. I would either get it with 2 drives or plan on adding the second you might as well take advantage of the extra storage if it’s available and you need it or will soon need it.

3. Don’t know what to tell you about the warranty. Costco’s would probably be better when it comes to replacement, but may take longer than the HP warranty if a simple repair is needed, this is just a guess though, I’d advise finding out exactly what Costco’s policy is, where the send it for repairs if applicable, turn around time, etc. While it may be great if they always replace it you don’t know what they might replace it with in a few years, you might not get an HP you might end up with an Averatech, worse case scenario of course

Why are u hating on the HP section of the forum?

And if HP was THAT bad, what brand would ur smart@$$ recommend? I've been thru 2 HP laptops and I havn't had any issues w/ neither of them. They cost relatively less than Dell for the exact same thing. Different styling too, dells all look the same right now.

Just came from the HP Peer to Peer Support and saw this post and had to advise something else... anything else! Yeah, I've been thru 2 HP laptops and funny thing, can't seem to keep the power going to them!! You must have the special ones. Look at the time of this posting... been online with tech support at HP at THIS hour.... on here looking for answers as well. HP is NOT my friend.. and that's what my smarta$$ thinks.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to look into video aids for low vision... presuming that is your condition. Perhaps I'm wrong; you didn't really say what your vision problem is. You might want to avoid the high resolution displays... stay with WXGA, and get an external large monitor.

The configuration you have listed is a good one. I would recommend, since you said your eyesight is not the greatest, getting the UltraBrite 1440x900 screen. I have that one and really like it. It looks better than the 20" Sun LCD I am using right now. If you really do not see the need right now to get a second drive, don't. You can always order a different drive when you want. You can order a driver carrier from here. Then you can decide what size and speed you wish to get.

Trust me, you will like the dv8000t. I have had mine since August 1st, and find it a very useful and functional toy.

Go for it. When you get the box, make sure you follow some of the re-installation guides that are listed on this site or learn how to use nlite to make a installation cd with the SATA and chipset drivers as part of the disk.

What kind of errors where you getting? I have three different USB 2.0 storage devices, one 1GB flash drive, a 2GB flash based mp3 player/drive, and a 40GB Hitachi IDE drive I put in a $10 external enclosure I bought from geeks.com. I have not had a problem using any of these drives. The harddrive is twice as fast in the transfer of files compared to the flash units. I can even burn DVD's at full 8x speed streaming off the external hard drive.