The Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv2810us notebook

Not only what I would consider a good deal, the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Laptop series, in my opinion, has been consistently the best, low-to-medium priced laptop series on the market for the past few years. Don't have 2-3 grand to drop on new laptop? Check out the Pavilion series. Last break I purchased my second Pavilion series and much like the first, it offers specs, features and performance found on it's higher-priced brothers from another mother.

My first Pavilion was the flagship 17" dv8000 model, prized for it's 17" ultra-bright widescreen and cherished for it's full keyboard and Quickplay (tm) buttons. It crunched numbers with a respectable (for the time) 1.83 GHz processor, had a ton of USB ports and came with a little media remote control that had it's own garage in the side of the laptop. My laptop came with a fucking garage and my house didn't! All this for well under $1,000.00.

Despite a few operational headaches (what computer is headache-free?) and the DVD combo drive burning out on me after 2 years, I immediately went back for more, this time around. This particular laptop purchase was motivated and restricted by the need for a lightweight and compact machine due to weight and space restrictions placed on me when traveling on small, foreign flights and especially the helicopters used to fly on and off my ships. My last rig, ensconced in it's wheeled, carry-on weighed in at a whopping 29 pounds! This, with charger, some CD's batteries, work files, book, etc., but way too heavy when I need to pack for 5-7 weeks and am limited to a total of 34 pounds. That doesn't leave much room for socks, underwear and toothpaste...

So, I went to the smaller Pavilions and liked what I saw at less than 6 pounds. Armed with this knowledge, I employed the awesome might of the Interwebs and Google, searching out every damn laptop under 7 pounds available at a TigerDirect, Circuit City, or Wally World near you. Three grand seemed to be some sort of magic number for ultra-light laptop/notebooks that came properly outfitted. I was not impressed. Additionally, many of these Vista-powered machines sported a measly 1GB RAM. A quick review of any Vista forum will inform you that Vista needs to eat damn near 1GB RAM just to sit there and look pretty. Armed with the knowledge that I didn't want, or need a $3,000.00 anchor, even if I do work at sea, I finally went back to the Pavilions.

I quickly listed a few suitably decked-out models, did some comparison shopping, reviewed the available, um, reviews and even ploughed through a few forums to glean as much helpful information as possible. I nearly settled on a special edition Pavillion that boasted 4GB RAM and a 250 GB hard-drive, but then came up against the reality that I had such a bad experience buying my last two computers online that I didn't have the balls to fork out more than the five bucks I dished out to the Death Chic(k) for this year's deathpool. Even my last Interwebs purchase of flowers for my oldest son's GF (no, I wasn't seducing her-he used my credit card, dammit) was responsible for my credit card being cancelled when the online flower company was hacked for customer credit card information.

This caused me to re-evaluate everything. You see, I live, well, really in the middle of nowhere, or at least in a place that isn't on the way to anywhere and is therefore sort of nowhere by default. Nowheresville has exactly four places that sell computers. Wally World, the pawn shop, a computer service store and an Office Max. Wally World sells 2 laptops, both totally unsuitable for my needs, configured wrong, lacking in RAM and over-priced. The pawnshop did have a hammer drill I wanted, but no laptops this time around. Used computers often come with the most interesting files and sometimes a boat-load of porn, by the way. The computer service store offered to build me a laptop at the same Pavilion specs I wanted- for $4,800.00 and my left nut, which by the way is still slightly swollen from my vasectomy and after that fiasco is worth more than it's weight in gold. Left with Office Max, I can't say I had any hope of escaping the possibility that some Glock toting dickhead with gold teeth was going to end up with my credit card info for the price of a 5-dollar rock and buy an Escalade with it.

Resolute, but disheartened,I made the trek through the wilderness to Office Max. I was more than pleasantly surprised to find they actually had a few laptops and joy, oh joy, several Pavilions, all suitably spec'd. I spent the mandatory 10 minutes politely listening to the sales kid reading off the description card while pretending to know which end of computer he'd like to loose his virginity to, memorized the specs and prices, respectfully replied, "Whatever" to his monologue, then left. The next day I stomped back in, prepared to tell the kid to shut his pie-hole and go get me the damn laptop. He wouldn't come near me and after whispering to another sales clerk, the second guy cautiously approached and asked if he could be of assistance. I asked him exactly two questions that couldn't be answered from the little card on the shelf and when he couldn't answer them, I asked for the damn box and made my way to the cashier.

Why do I mention the whole buying experience as part of the review? I just like to complain about the seemingly endless line of incompetent mohans (thats "morons" for those of you who don't know LP) that pass for sales clerks and customer service reps that try to tell me things I already know, or completely talk out of there asses about things they know absolutely nothing about. End rant.

I purchased the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv2810us model. This 14.1", Brightview widesceeen laptop comes spec'd with 3GB DDR2 RAM (660 MHz), (2) 2.0 GHz AMD Turion (tm) 64 X2 TL-60 processors with 1 MB L2 cache, offering 32-bit processing, but 64-bit capable, (512KB + 512KB), NVIDIA GeForce GO 7150M graphics and 1071MB of total available graphics memory, a 250 GB, 5400 RMP hard drive, dual-layer, Lightscribe (tm) combination DVD/CD burner/reader, built-in web cam and integrated mic, 5-in-1 card reader, Quickplay buttons, remote and built-in 802.11G wireless LAN and Bluetooth. It operates under Microsoft's Windows Vista Home Premium and arrives almost devoid of all the freeware/trial version/internet service crap that most computers are completely saturated with out of the box.

Thin and light, it weighs in at 5.3 pounds and about average thickness for the ultra-light laptop crowd. Still, it remains solid and sturdy, boasting an especially stiffly opening screen. The screen is bright and clear, even on battery power, but glare is an issue in certain light. The dual AMD TL-60's offer good speed and should even power some of the higher-end games, but with the installed graphics, high-end gaming is not for this machine.

I love the Quickplay feature with a row of controls that will boot up only the Quickplay software, allowing you to watch DVD movies without powering up the whole box and booting Windows. This, in theory should extend battery life for say, movie viewing on my 39 hours of flying to work:) The little remote and it's garage are also a nice plus. The Lightscribe drives make pretty disk labels and a combo drive is the only way to go until CDs are a thing of the past. This would be the only negative for me, as the DVD drive in my last Pavilion prompted, in part, this purchase, yet here I am again, with the same drive.

The 250 GB hard drive is more than enough space to haul around 50GB music, 40 GB of ripped movies and 100GB of porn, while allowing for a few dozen extra programs and 3 files for work;) Vista runs the whole show pretty well and while I was extremely reluctant to purchase a Vista machine, after a couple of weeks I'm finding it fairly stable with a few useful features such as the software monitor, Defender, and its Network and Sharing Center. I'm used to the differences and quirks and have disabled that annoying "do you want to allow this?" feature.

All in all, at under $800.00 it is a steal of a deal. You cannot buy these specs and features in a laptop that weighs under 6 pounds unless it's hot, or used. I added a two-year unconditional warranty from Office Max, and purchased a back-up, 12 cell battery, which when inserted, jacks the laptop up like a hot rod from the 70's. It gives me a total of over 6 hours of what I would call "plane use", that is multi-tasking, music-listening, DVD watching I do on a plane.

It's inexpensive, reliable, stylish, lightweight and sturdy, with good performance. If this is your bag, then the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv2800 series should be your box.

The image above, from Hewlett-Packard, makes it look damn nice, which it is. However, this is what it looks like in real life, sitting on my desk.