.. I’ve been somewhat inactive. Besides work there’s a lot of stuff which has been keeping me very busy in the recent times. From Android, to Reason and Cubase, I’ve been learning a lot and therefore I’ve kind of neglected my-digital-self, this blog.

Anyway, the biggest news is that I bought myself a laptop, a simply beautiful HP 530 to be more precise, and I must say god damn I love this baby! Under the hood there’s a Centrino Duo 1.66Ghz, 2Gb RAM, SATA 160Gb 5.4k, 802.11b/g, 2 USB 2.0, DVD-RW DL and an Intel GMA 950 graphics card. As I’m no gamer, this is a great and very cheap machine. Why cheap? Well, I paid only 700 Euro for it! Even it’s a bargain I can tell you it has beaten every adversary, in my quest for the perfect laptop. Here’s my criteria:

• Centrino Duo – OK;
• Must have >=2Gb RAM – OK;
• Intel chipset for Linux full compliance – OK;
• Low-heat and noiseless – BIG OK;
• Simple (I hate extra-buttons and neat plastic!) – OK;
• Firewire for external audio card – KO, the only thing missing but I can live with that (alternatives are USB or PCMCIA-Firewire card);
• Must be cheap (<1000 Euro) – Bingo;
• Must bundle Vista so I can have a glance of pleasure when deleting it – Hell Yeah!

Now, I’m not a benchmark fan so you can stop right there if you mean to throw me some of those. All I want, I have, so far, with this piece of hardware. And what surprises me the most is that is comes from the ex-Compaq, which I used to hate for its anti-Linux hardware.

Here are my notes, so far:

1. Windows Vista – fully-supported or shouldn’t it be the bundled OS. Lasted as long as a day, I just can’t stand it!
2. Windows XP – had problems with loading the SATA driver during install initialization (HP instructions are wrong. Please go to Intel’s website and look there). After the install a lot of drivers were missing. HP website was wrong again. Thanks Intel! It’s amazing how some people talk about device drivers in Linux..
3. Linux (Ubuntu 7.10) – Everything just went smoothly as I have ever wanted and “it just works”.
4. I’ll be using Windows XP for audio production and Linux for everything else.

So if you’re looking for a good laptop, look no more, this is the one! At least for me it is..

Oh and btw, this blog is one year old.. the same age for me at Nokia Siemens Networks. Been fun, looking for more

Cheers,

PP

Update: HP 530 w/ Ubuntu 7.10 review