New Notebook

HP Pavilion zv5000

A reader asked me recently about the Circuit City warranty issue I was having with my Sony Vaio notebook. The problem is that about two and a half years into the warranty the Sony was giving me problems. First the hard drive died. Then the monitor died. I sent it back three times to have the monitor fixed. The good news is they invoked the lemon clause of my contract and I received a replacement notebook. The downside is that my only choice was a refurbished notebook, the HP Pavilion zv5000, or a $900 check. It's not the notebook I would have chosen to replace my Sony, but I needed a notebook and I couldn't buy one with the these specs for $900 unless I went refurbished anyway. It has a wide-screen high definition display, a Pentium 4 3GHz and an 80GB hard drive. It only came with a 256MB RAM DIMM that I quickly upgraded to 1GB and it runs very well.

The lesson here is that extended warranties are good for notebooks since they take more abuse than a ten-year-old visiting Neverland Ranch. Between the commuter train, airport security, and a host of other absent-minded abuses, it's really surprising notebooks last as long as they do. Based on my research, the best warranties for notebooks come from CompUSA, Dell, and Circuit City. The Best Buy warranties seem good on the surface, but I've known too many people who claimed the Best Buy extended warranty was one of the greatest lies perpetrated on mankind.

So I have this new notebook with the high-def screen and the super-fast processor and I'm thinking, what now? So naturally I decided to re-skin Windows. Why would I do that you ask? Because I can. The goal was to keep my desktop clean, make my interface unique so that my peers will think I'm so cool (or just pathetic), and pass the super boring time between Family Guy and Robot Chicken.

The first software I downloaded was the popular ObjectDock program launcher. One annoyance of my new notebook's display is my limitation of 1280 x 800 pixels. I was used to much higher on the Sony. This means the task bar gets cluttered really quick. ObjectDock replaces the Quick Launch toolbar and behaves similarly to the OS X dock.

Another space-saver is the Actual Window Manager. This utility can minimize any program to the Windows Notification Area. This handy when you have several windows open and you feel oppressed by the horsy buttons polluting the taskbar.

Finally, I downloaded Star Skin, which give me the ability to add freely downloadable skins to my Windows interface. As you can see below, I have an affinity for the EclipseOSX skin that Apple really hates.