Don't have the box with me but it is the only 128GB Patriot 2.5" SSD that Fry's Electronics sells. The other drive is a 320GB 2.5" Western Digital 7200RPM drive, also the only one of its manufacturer/speed/size at Fry's Electronics. www.frys.com <--not an advertisement. I don't work there, I just send all my paychecks there lol!

Nick - thanks! I'll check out Fry's tomorrow when I pick up my HP DV7-2040US. I am looking at a Samsung 256 GB SSD drive on ebay that looks pretty good too.

Bah, some people can afford all the toys. The 256GB Patriot SSD I looked at cost half as much as the laptop, over $650 BEFORE tax!

I just increased the RAM in mine to 8GB. Check out memory-up.com. I got two sticks of 4GB PC2-6400 for $156/ea. I also upgraded both internal drives to Seagate 500GB 5400RPM models and am dual-booting Fedora 10 and Vista 64 Ultimate. The performance improvement between the RAM upgrade and the harddrives was phenomenal.

DavidTx, yes the drives really slow it down. I almost took that exact same route as you with the drives, but decided later that 1TB of disk space in a laptop is COOL but not practical. I don't keep that much data on this machine. 320GB secondary 7200RPM drive is more than enough for even the most demanding video editing I personally do, and the 128GB SSD holds all my programs including three of the four operating systems I boot off it.

However, I am also an obsessive compulsive backeruper so I COULD get away with a single 64GB SSD and have ALL my programs including Adobe Master Suite, Visual Studio 2008 Professional, and tons of other graphics/video/development software I use.

Does the RAM really improve performance for you? The only way I see 8GB being helpful is if you are either doing some intense multitasking with very memory hungry programs. That's what I do and I can't seem to break the 4GB unless I try to intentionally. I know I could with VMWare, but I don't run more than one VM at a time and I always set to 2GB of RAM

I'm glad you're happy with your machine David! I sure am. The quirks are not that big of a deal when you look at the big picture. The touchpad isn't so bad anymore and I find myself using this computer more than my Acer 5535-5018 now. The battery life is pretty poor though. I am very impatient and cannot stand to run on "Power Saver" so I usually run on "High Performance" with the screen turned all the way down. The screen seems to be the biggest power hog of them all, CPU/Graphics in the 2nd/3rd places. But if I am just browsing the web, my graphics card isn't even lifting a finger and the CPU is basically just sitting around waiting for input most of the time, so with the screen turned down I get worse, but not TOO much worse than with Power Saver mode on. Only difference is that if I want to quickly do something that demands a bit of flexing of the laptop's muscles, I know there won't be any lagtime. Power Saver may give 25% more battery life with the way I use it, but if I have to wait for the hard drives to power back on when saving a file, or for Photoshop to load all its resources from a powered down drive and initialize everything on a downclocked CPU...well it can take that 25% and I'll pull out my other laptop.

I'm a heavy VMware user as a software developer, so the quad core in the notebook was a huge win for me. Having upgraded it now to 8GB of RAM and dual 500's, I'm able to have several VM's running with little impact on performance. It's an awesome notebook.

DavidTx, how about some benchmarks from you're machine?

I want to get 8GB not so much because I _NEED_ it, but because I am such a geek that I have to get it because I can. But if I DID have 8GB, I would probably max it out with Workstation loaded with multiple instances of assorted operating systems. One reason I like this laptop so much is because Firefox has not yet made an option to save all open tabs OFFLINE and load them up from cache upon restarting. I like to open 50+ tabs at the same time when doing research and then reading them later when I am out and about, most of the time being internetless. If I restart, I have to find internet access to load those pages, not always possible when out of the office. VMWare lets me start the machine right where it was before which is one of my #1 reasons why I like this machine. It runs an instance of XP 100% seamlessly with no glitches, twitches, or flinches during operation.

So DavidTx, what made you decide to settle with the dv7-2040US? Was it the fancy artwork that did you in too? I am getting the case silkscreened with the Rebel Flag. Waiting on finishing the design of a top secret laptop mod that will revolutionize the way mobile geeks "borrow" internet when on the road and it may involve putting the HP under the dremel to make things fit. I'll post the details, and possibly the schematics and parts list when I am done. Would have been close to completed but I had to order a new Arduino board that was small enough to fit where the TV Tuner went. Going to have to figure out how to either edit HP's hardware whitelist, or spoof the TV Tuner or WIFI Card's hardware IDs. I've said too much already. >)

Also, why do you have 2 posts, -60 Credits, and have been a member since Jan 2005? :P Weird...

Good FAQ here regarding NBF Credits Score:

http://www.notebookforums.com/faq.ph...faq_forumusage

cheers ...

gqn, thanks for posting that. Yes, I have read that before, and the negative credits alone wouldn't have sparked my interest. But having only two posts (both being in this thread) and a member for 4.5yrs made it all seem odd. :P

Not knowing the history of the user's credit it is hard to say, by just looking at the profile alone. The user alone can submit the request to admins (red coloured id) for review.

cheers ...

my m1730 ratings are-
6.1
6.1
5.9
5.9
5.9

i am having some pains uploading them lol

Can a moderator please move Alienwares' post to the "Jealous bullshitters" section of this site? Thanks!

partially thanks to this topic i just ordered the dv7-2040us...

I compared it to a crap load of laptops and the best of the 16:9 laptops currently available, especially at the price (1300). The quad-core processor is what really got me interested and the graphics card is one of the better ones available for 16:9 laptops. The only other things i would have wanted on this were a 1920x1080 screen and a blu-ray player, especially with the hardware in this thing, but my choices in laptop were either a 16.4'' sony laptop with blu-ray/1080p with limited gaming ability, a more expensive asus with a blu-ray player but with the same 1600x1900 screen with better processor/graphics card but worst then this, and this.

i decided to take the one with the best hardware, and if i want blu-ray later on the laptop has an HDMI port, i'll just add it later. Thanks for your review and the windows index experience. BTW i hear this laptop gets a 7.0 processor score on windows 7. sounds nice

VegetarianEater, I love your username! Funny shit lol!

Vista scores at 5.8 CPU so I don't see how it would score 7.0 on Win7. I know that the CPU test calculates multi-core performance better in Win7, but this processor is still a fairly lower performing member of Intel's new Core-2-Quads. I have yet to install the beta so I would be wrong here. I don't think MS is still giving out beta serial numbers so I may have to wait to test. If they are then I will install sometime this weekend. I know that the SSD I have will damn near peg the disk test because it uses a lot of random read/writes to calculate performance and I currently have a 5.9 in Vista.

Have you had issues with the audio controller crashing and/or the volume slider not working right? Either not working at all or not giving volume level visual feedback on the center of the screen? It stops working after installing my software but I don't know which one is conflicting with it.

For whatever reaon HP no longer lists this laptop online. In fact they only have a couple that are even remotely comparable to it but are expensive. Strange because this laptop was released in March. CPU was released late lat year. Hmmmmm.

Btw, Backtrack Linux Network Security Testing Suite v3 and v4 Beta won't run. There is a problem with the graphics and won't boot into X/KDE or whatever it uses. Kinda sucks because that is a valuable networking security suite for me and millions of networking specialists worldwide. I had to build a USB boot disk with Slackware containing all my needed tools. I like it better than Backtrack anyways. Maybe I'll release it. How does RedNICS Linux sound? Or maybe a BSD version called RedNeXT? HillBillySD? Hmmmmm.

lol thanks, my username is my xbox live gamertag.

as for sound i have no idea as i wont get the laptop until monday. The vista scores could have been exaggerated but i don't know, you can read that review at amazon.
Edit: another review at newegg mentions scoring 7s in windows 7.

I don't recall ever seeing this version of the laptop on HP's website, but i do know they've stopped using the Q9000 as a customization option.

and for the last part i've never used linux and have no idea what you're talking about