After lurking NBF since early March, I finally dropped some dough, replacing my dying 800MHz PowerBook G4 with an HP nx6325. Thanks to all NBF members for your insight & info. I wanted as future-proof a machine as possible, but I decided I needed a new laptop by around the first week of July, in the USA. So waiting for Merom or the Ferrari 5000 was out. I had to buy now.

My principal applications will be development of computational relativity theory codes (number-crunching) and audio editing and light audio recording tasks. yea, for the physics I typically use workstations and supercomputers, but it's nice to be able to get some work done on your laptop. For this reason, I was also looking for something that could support up to 4GB of RAM.

Before going into this, I'd made a list of specs which I was looking for, ultimately decided to skimp on the graphics card (because gaming takes up too much of my life and I want to move away from that):
What I was looking for:
Display: 15" - 16".
Processor: Dual core, 64 Bit. 2GHz or faster.
Memory: 2GB, supports up to 4GB
Graphics Card: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600.
or Nvidia GeForce Go 7600
Hard Drive: 100GB, 7200rpm
Ports: Firewire (IEEE 1394 ok)
DVI out
USB 2.0
Media drive: DVD-RW or better (LaserScribe would rock)
Weight: 6.5lbs or lighter
Get 3 year extended service warranty
*No* other features matter. (card readers, etc...)
Price: $2500 or lower.


Currently HP won't let you customize, you just have to buy one of their preconfigured models. Here are the specs for the one I bought, which is currently their "top of the line" choice.

HP Part #: EN191UA#ABA
OS:Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional
Processor:AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-60 (2.0GHz; 2x512KB L2 cache)
Memory: 1024MB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (2 DIMM), (Supports 4096MB 2 DIMM)
100 GB Hard drive (5400 rpm)
15.0-inch SXGA+ display
DVD +/- RW Drive (fixed)
56K modem
Network card: NetLink Gigabit Ethernet Controller (10/100/1000 NIC)
Wireless hardware: Broadcom 4311AG 802.11 a/b/g
Additional wireless and communications: Integrated Bluetooth

So, the HP I got meets my desired specs except for the graphics card, the DVI out, the hard drive speed and the installed RAM. All told, with the 3-year warranty added, after sales tax (which they haven't quoted me yet), it will probably cost around $1850.

It was a pain trying to buy. (One wonders, "if it's this hard trying to BUY from them, what will it be like trying to get support?". But I've had very similar problems with both Apple and Dell too.) The HP website will give you a blank page for "Checkout" under Firefox, and if you use IE it still locks up. Talked to various HP people for a period of 24 hours. Had a support ticket opened which no one responded to. Finally I called and got transferred to a guy named Tom (ext 15607) who was ACTUALLY helpful! Managed to order the machine, a warranty, and a docking station.

I got the docking station pretty much *just* to get the DVI output. The notebook itself only has VGA out, but the docking station has a DVI port. $150 just for a DVI port is lame, but the notebook itself is pretty inexpensive to begin with.

Yea, the internal hard drive is slow. I plan to use it with a firewire audio interface and record to an external hard drive... I have a 7200 rpm firewire drive, which I probably can't daisy-chain with the audio interface, but maybe I can replace the drive enclosure with a USB 2.0 enclosure.

Also, I wanted more RAM, but I'll just buy some from a 3rd Party.


Okay, well, fingers crossed. I'll let you know what I think about it and post some pics if/when it arrives in about 2 weeks.