My wife’s laptop decided to be unreliable. I took the opportunity to upgrade her to a new computer. As with many items I am attempting to keep things portable. So we are upgrading her from a 15 inch Toshiba laptop that I purchased in 2007 for ($400) to a 13 inch HP Dm3-1130. I chose the HP for 2 reasons; size and price.
Of all the 13.1 inch laptops out there this was the most reasonable in terms of price. It has the AMD vision processor (though I’m not a fan of AMD). A very nice aluminum / brushed case that is really small. The price was hard to beat, $499 for a 13.1 inch laptop is pretty hard to find. The purchasing experience was interesting. I had been looking for a deal both online and locally, when I found this at officemax. Two of the 3 local stores did not carry it. When I did find it, the sales team was very admit that I needed an external mouse, and many other accessories / software if I purchased this machine. I am guessing they are suggested to offer these items to anyone purchasing a computer. However, that process of telling a computer shopper that they need to purchase software or other items makes me angry.
So far (day 2) the machine is great. I had to (decrapify) the computer but I was expecting that. The little guy has a great keyboard, fun to type on. The machine has no DVD or CD-rom drive. Not having a media drive is just fine with me, we don’t have any CD’s or DVD’s anymore. So far the battery life has been as expected 4 plus hours. It is now loaded with Windows 7 (x64) and has pretty good performance.
Overall, this will be my wife’s primary laptop that she takes with her and uses at home. I HP did a great job on this laptop.