• AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core Mobile ZM84, 2.3GHz
• 4GB of RAM, I haven’t checked the brand but it seems fast
• 320GB of hard drive space on a Western Digital drive
• ATI M92 (Mobility Radeon 4500 series, 4530), seems to have 512MB of RAM
• eSATA, USB and FireWire
• ExpressCard
• XD/MMC/SD slot
• HDMI and VGA
• QuickDock (v3 I think)

HP Blurb

The biggest problem so far has been the graphics card, so far I’ve been unable to get it working with fglrx. I have the standard X drivers working and they give me full screen output but that too was a bit of a fight. However under Vista the card seems incredibly powerful for a laptop and it has no problems playing DVDs using the standard X drivers under Linux. However the iPlayer will not play without major chopping. Hulu plays but only at standard resolution and without full screen.

The sound works perfectly using the snd_hda_intel module and one small adjustment to its config. In fact I’m quite impressed with the volume and power the speakers can create. The file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf now contains:

options snd-hda-intel model=hp-hdx

eSATA, USB and FireWire all appear to work correctly. All I’ve noticed is that the eSATA port’s USB functionality seems to be a little low power, I can use everything except for hard drives which act as if I’d plugged them into a USB 1.1 port.

Strangely I can’t get the XD/SD etc slot to work, this is pretty normal though so I’m not too bothered. It does seem to help if I disable the power saving for them and FireWire in the BIOS. No idea why, maybe someone else will have more information on this.

The laptop can take two hard drives and I’ve found a second miniPCIe slot. Unfortunately the second hard drive needs a ‘kit’ to be installed, I’ll blog more about this when I get a chance to install one. However, with hard drives the size they are these days this makes for at least 1TB of space without too much heat overload.

I haven’t yet worked out the obligiroy IrDA, it seems it’s somehow hooked through the BIOS to allow the included remote to function (including the luxury of a power button). I haven’t had any other problems with it yet, the ExpressCard slot seems to work perfectly as do the other various ports.

Over all this is an excellent laptop with a lot of power, although it’s large enough to watch DVDs on it is also small enough and light enough to be portable.

Kind regards, Robert.