My new laptop, an HP Pavilion zt3010US, is a bit lower-end than Michael’s, although pretty close to the top of the line for what you can get at a mass retailer like Best Buy. Superficially, it strongly resembles the Compaq Presario laptop I bought a couple of years ago and passed on to my dad—while all the screen printing is HP stuff, the keyboard has the exact feel the Presario did. Of course, all these things are made by OEMs in mainland China anyway, but this is clearly part of the HP-Compaq synergy. As Brock noted when I talked with him about the machine, the Pavilion name used to be damaged goods, on the order of the well-deserved ignomony conferred on Packard Bell PCs.

Like Michael’s machine, it’s most distinguishing feature is the widescreen display; the resolution is “only” 1280×800, but it’s still larger than any laptop I’ve ever owned… and it’s a better display than any LCD I’ve ever used, including my desktop Samsung 1280×1024 LCD. Under the hood, it’s a full-blown Centrino: a 1.5 GHz Pentium M CPU with Intel’s 2100 wireless chipset, boring Intel AC’97 audio, and a fairly slick ATI Mobile Radeon 9200 graphics card (slicker than the Radeon 8500DV in my PC). Actually, everything about it is slicker than my desktop PC.

HP skimped on including an external floppy drive—although I still have the USB floppy drive that came with the Toshiba junker that this replaced—but it compensates nicely with a DVD+RW/CD-RW combo drive. 3 USB 2.0 ports, a legacy parallel port (omitted on the Toshiba), VGA and S-Video out, softmodem, and wired 10/100 Ethernet are also included. The only real misfeature is that only one PCMCIA slot is included, instead of the two that are typical on most laptops.

The Toshiba, which was a poorly-engineered piece of garbage based on an underclocked desktop Pentium III chip, sucked battery like nobody’s business—you were lucky to get two hours of battery life out of it. So far, it looks like the HP will do at least 3 hrs under light load, in part thanks to the low-power Centrino setup.

Everything about the machine is fast. The 60GB hard drive seems zippier than my desktop drives. Package upgrades under Debian are wicked fast.

The only downsides I’ve seen so far: the Centrino wireless is only supported under Linux via ndiswrapper, and the software support for the CPU frequency scaling and the like—as is typical with Debian—is “you have to track down the packages you need yourself.” (I guess we need to work on that.)