OK, so I've been on the HP for a little over 24 hours now. Let me hit the high points:

HDMI Output is a plus, one of those things that I'll try using eventually just because it is there.

Hard switch for wireless antenna off is one of those things that I really like to see in a design. I can never shake the feeling of uncertainty that the wireless antenna is still sipping some power in the off mode when there is only a keyboard combination on-off feature.

Has one of the things I dislike, and that is front-mounted headphone jacks. When you are on a plane, the headphone plug, if it is not a right angle plug, is always in the way. Even sitting at my desk, there is just a feeling of obstruction when it is jammed out pointing at you. But I will not be using headphones a lot in the LAN room, and the laptop is too big for me to pull out on a plane, so I'll probably get over this.

ExpressCard TV Tuner is a plus in the value of the unit. I have not tried it yet but will be taking it on travel with me. I like the idea of being able to record TV directly instead of only to DVD on my DVR in the living room.

Small gripe about the front-to-rear sloping design that is so popular in laptops these days. The idea is that by making the laptop taper from rear to front, it does not take up as much thickness in a bag. My Gateway TabletPC, more due to the huge 12-cell battery/tablet handle at the rear of the unit, has the same design effect. The problem it creates is that when the DVD drive is mounted on the right-hand side of the unit, the leading edge is too low to clear a mousepad, requiring you to either move the pad to the right, or tilt the laptop upwards when opening the drive. Another gripe about this unit's optical drive is that the release button is so small and indented that I can not even feel for it, I have to lean over and look at the button in order to depress it and open the drive.

I questioned the value of a 17" screen, but this screen is gorgeous. I have yet to watch video on it, but in gaming the screen offers a lot more real-estate, which makes unit management in RTS' better, which is primarily what I have been playing for the initial test run. I have not had a chance to try out the webcam, which sits at the top of the screen.

I have always thought that the rest of the computer and technology media make way too much of an issue dinging laptops with a negative hit in reviews for not having media buttons. I never use them on either my desktop keyboards or on laptops. The ones on the HP, though, are touch sensitive, flat buttons. It will be interesting to see how long into the service life of this unit these continue to function, but the touch-sensitive volume slider is something I have been using, and I'll let you know why below.

The Altec Lansing speakers on this thing are LOUD. The loudest laptop speakers I have ever experienced. I can hear the unit playing tunes when I'm getting dressed in my bedroom. I admit that I am not an acoustic cognoscenti, but I believe that the sound quality is pretty darn good. My iTunes archive of tunes sounds pretty sharp so far and, again, I can not wait to try out a DVD and hear the sound on the unit. I actually have had to crank down the sound effects level in most of the games I have tried because the speakers are just too loud when they are sitting right in front of your face. I had been thinking about getting another 2.0 speaker system for this unit, like I have done recently for my desktops, but there is absolutely no need.

The full-sized keyboard is another plus. The numeric keypad is something I had thought I would not have much use for. Instead of the typical WASD setup that most FPS gamers use, I use the numeric keypad for shooters when I'm on my desktop, but that requires shoving the keyboard over to the left and having only the right-hand side of the keyboard in front of me. You can not do that on a laptop since the screen would then also offset. However, for these first couple of days when I have had to enter a dozen product codes for various games and software loads, it has been useful. There are also numeral lock and CAPS lock LED's that assist in awareness when working on the keyboard. I was not a fan of the travel distance of the keys or the way the main keyboard felt cramped due to the need to fit the numeric keypad into the footprint, but I have grown accustomed to it over the last 24 hours.

There are very few Synaptic keypads that I have ever cared for; I always use an external mouse except when I am sitting in the lobby of an airport. That being said, there is a hardware on-off switch for the keypad on the HP, which is a huge value. Disabling the keypad via software, and then disabling the driver startup in MSCONFIG frequently results in buggy behavior when you do have to enable the keypad. I have not used the finger-print reader, which tend to send you an alert from time to time when my palm brushes over it while using the laptop. This has not proven a huge deal, and so I have chosen to not disable it just in case I do decide to use it later.

Performance has been more than adequate so far. Although I have not subjected it to any really punishing games or ripped any video, my experience so far has been good. The unit rates a 4.5 performance index in Windows Vista, and that is for the processor, not the video card. I am pretty confident this unit will fit my needs as the next few months go on.

OK, so how about Windows VISTA? I like it, but that is about all I can say. Aesthetically, it bears some semblance to OS X, at least in visual cues. I like the "Games" module in the Start pop-up. It represents each game with an icon of the box cover, and the mouse fly-over and details area when the icon is actually left-clicked, shows version information, release date, and last played date and time. All of these fields are things that I usually track either via a text file, or by renaming the shortcuts, so it is nice that Vista does it for you.

Despite all of the comments of Vista incompatibility with various applications and hardware, I have relatively few issues. My AT&T Communications Manager and USB Cellular modem both work. iTunes, Firefox, and Thunderbird are all good to go. Communications and Security Apps are good: Ad-Aware, AVG Anti-Virus, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, X-Fire, and Zone Alarm all installed and run without a hitch. Foxit Reader and all Microsoft Office 2003 Apps have shown no problems so far (someone once told me that you had to go to Office 2007 to use Vista; apparently no longer the case).

DivX, DVD43, are all onboard NERO 7 Ultra, although I am reserving judgment until I actually get a chance to fully test these applications.

I will also site that I am adopting Vista 8 months after its launch, so I reckon a lot of bugs have been addressed. I can not say that every single thing has worked; there are no Vista drivers for my Network Attached Storage, although I am able to access them by making them shared drives on the B-Tower and then mapping to the drives as if they were drives on the desktop. There have been a few games that would not install or not play. Some of them I determined that the installer would not work if it launched from another front-end application, like an autorun menu. Once I explored the CD and actually used the Setup executable, a lot of those titles installed fine. Finally, my GameSpot download manager keep re-initializing in a do loop, never actually downloading the file I directed it to.

Overall there are so few hiccups that I have not been frustrated or dissatisfied. The OS is a resource hog, like all of its predecessors. There is no doubt that anyone who cares anything about performance is probably going to want 2GB of memory. I have this much on the HP, and almost 600MB were being used by the OS during normal desktop ops when I was not playing music.

So far I have to say that I am happy with the HP and with Vista. I can not recommend any rush to update to the new OS. The DirectX 10 games are still trickling in, and I predict they will still look pretty good, even running in DirectX 9 mode. The user login and account management features are pretty nice, and I do not mind being asked to permit an item to install before the executable proceeds. This will probably be a nicer feature for people who have multiple users on single systems, and parents who have kids that they want to security block from installing stuff on their PC. I also like how the OS will tie and store passwords across all applications and websites to a specified account. I have had to setup guest accounts on laptops before because someone I was on travel with did not have one and wanted to use one of mine.

As with all new gadgets, games, and software, my true judgment of any product's value is reserved for mid-term and long-term reports. For now, the initial impressions are good. Let's hope they stay that way.
- Vr/GulliverJR.>