Hardware

Three MiFi (Huawei E5830) 3G and WiFi access point all in one, first impressions

Liam Westley — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:08:17 GMT

I have been using a 3G Mobile Broadband dongle from Three [http://www.three.co.uk/Mobile_Broadband/MiFi ] for just over a year and have been very happy with the service. It helps that I am on a half price deal and only pay £7.50 per month for 5Gb of data. I normally don’t use the dongle that was provided, as I have internal 3G cards in both my HP 6910p laptop and my Acer Aspire One netbook.

I have found it a bit of a hassle to have to move the SIM card between the laptop and the netbook, and my poor Benq E72 Windows Mobile phone has been left in the slow lane. It only has GPRS/EDGE when out and about, although it does have fast WiFi when at home or in the office.

When I heard about the new ‘MiFi’ unit from Huawei that combines a 3G dongle and WiFi access point all in one package I was intrigued. Capable of connecting multiple WiFi devices to a shared 3G connection, for up to 4 hours on the internal battery, this tiny device sounded like a great solution to my problem. I can connect my laptop, netbook and Benq E72 phone all via WiFi to a fast 3G mobile broadband connection using the same 3G SIM card.

The device is really simple, five lights give just enough information and the three buttons make life very easy,

It’s hard to understand from that photograph just how small this device is, but if I put it next to a credit card you can see just how small it is. It is not much bigger or heavier than my Benq E72 candy bar phone, which is incredible for a 3G dongle and WiFi router combined,

The device comes with a charger, but also charges via mini USB, so will be a doddle to top up. Using the supplied USB to mini USB lead it can be connected to a Windows PC not only to charge, but to install the 3 WiFi manager. Similar to previous Huawei dongles, once connected a drive letter appears as if you have inserted a CD, and this contains all the drivers and software required. This installed first time on both my laptop and netbook, Windows 7 (both x64 and x86).

You can use the WiFi manager to configure the unit, and can also treat the MiFi as a standard 3G USB dongle where you manually dial the connection so you can use it without the WiFi turned on. As well as providing options to turn WiFi on and off, the utility provided all standard WiFi options such as changing the SSID (and hiding it) and setting a different password. Interestingly the utility also provides access to the range of Firewall options, including a DMZ - wow!

The final feature is a microSDHC slot, which unfortunately isn’t shared between connected devices as part of the WiFi connection, but appears as a drive letter when the dongle is connected to a system with the USB lead.

I could describe how the device actually switches on and how the buttons work, but there’s a much better video review of the device from one of my friends, Ewan McLeod on Mobile Developer TV, which saves me the effort.

http://www.mobiledeveloper.tv/?p=209

So, what are my first impressions? This is a fantastic device; it’s incredibly simple, easy to use and just ... well, works.

It’s available for £99 on pay as you go, and £69 for a 5Gb per month £15 rolling 1 month contract. There is no upgrade for existing customers, so I just bought the 1 month rolling contract, which I’m cancelling so the total cost for me is £85. Bargain!

I wouldn't buy a phone that didn't charge off USB because ...

Liam Westley — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:48:07 GMT

I recently bought a new Windows Mobile phone, Benq E72, and one reason it won over a Samsung model is the standard mini-USB connector for data and charging (hint, hint, Nokia).

Why does this matter? Apart from charging off any laptop, and off an 4 x AA battery pack I already have for emergency charging, it can even charge off the weirdest devices. Here it is with a standard USB to mini USB lead charging from my Philips DVD recorder which has a USB port for displaying photos and playing MP3s.

If you need a clearer image of the phone screen try here.

I'm always stunned by phones with a mini USB port but can't charge from it (Nokia's, until recently), even more by phones with a mini USB port that will only charge from their own charger (Alcatel). Not counting the worse offenders, phone manufacturers who connect via USB but have customer connectors (Samsung, it's you I'm looking at) that lock you to the one and only charger you get with the unit.

Review: DisplayLink USB to DVI adapter, adding an external display to a laptop or desktop

Liam Westley — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:04:38 GMT

DisplayLink USB

Last week I wrote a review of a Kensington USB docking station which included DisplayLink technology to allow an external display to be added to a laptop via a USB 2.0 port. I described how I used this docking station to enable the holy grail of three external screens on my laptop. You can read about it here,

http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2009/06/03/132579.aspx

Declaring an interest

On publishing, I promoted the blog post via Twitter where recently someone had bemoaned the inability of a laptop to support more than two displays. I was curious to see if DisplayLink might follow me on Twitter, and checked to see if they had an active account. When I discovered they had no account, I created a DisplayLink account and sent the guys at www.displaylink.com the username and password so they could keep it safe for future use.

The next day, the marketing guys at DisplayLink sent me an e-mail thanking me for setting up the Twitter account. Also, as a gesture of appreciation they requested my address so they could send out a USB to DVI adapter based on their DL-160 chipset.

So a big thanks to DisplayLink for enabling me to review the DVI version.

Hardware

Unlike the Kensington docking station which incorporated a USB 10/100 network chip, 4 port hub and USB audio, this is a dedicated display unit. It’s wonderfully compact compared to the full docking station, approx 10cm x 5cm. Connecting to the PC via a standard mini USB lead, it is self powered via USB, with video displayed using a DVI connector.

DVI Connector

Mini USB Connector

(I placed a measuring tape next to the adapter sio you can see just how small it is, the tape measure is locked at 10cm)

Software

The software was identical to that used for the Kensington docking station (see previous blog post for details), I just left the old driver in place. When I booted up Windows 7 RC there was a ‘New Hardware Device’ pop up for a few seconds, after which the DisplayLink adapter worked immediately, appearing as my display number 3 on my desktop.

Being a DVI output, the image was crisp and rock steady first time, with no need to adjust the display. If anything it looked slightly brighter with better contrast on my test 17” display compared to the analogue version in the docking station, but that is most likely due to the monitor settings.

Conclusion

My third monitor, a 17” Sharp model, while great on the DVI connection, is slightly fuzzy when displaying analogue VGA, so having a DVI version of DisplayLink is a great solution for my setup.

The small size of the dedicated adapter really sells itself to those who spend their life fighting with projectors at client sites. Having a couple of these, for both analogue and DVI solutions means you could guarantee best connectivity.

I’m tempted to lend the unit to a friend who regularly finds Windows 7 RC on his Mac Air struggles to connect to projectors at anything above 640 x 480 to see if this could solve the problem. I suspect it might.

It’s one of those rare IT products. It does a single job, really well, with the minimum of effort to install.

Review: Three external screens from a single laptop with help from DisplayLink

Liam Westley — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:07:16 GMT

As a developer I’ve become used to multiple monitors to increase my productivity. Debugging applications is much easier when one monitor is running Visual Studio and a second monitor is displaying the application being debugged, or SQL Management Studio, or your Locals window.

When I plugged my latest HP 6910p laptop into the docking station I was amazed to find that it supported dual external displays; both the DVI and analogue VGA ports can be active simultaneously. It’s a real advantage to get off the laptop display which I never find ideal when working at a desk. You really need the two monitors to be arranged side by side rather than above each other. This places the laptop much further away than normal and makes the screen hard to read.

I’ve been using dual 17” monitors at 1280 x 1024 with my laptop/docking station combination for some time. A few months ago I bought a 24” HD screen, 1920 x 1080. The ‘spare’ 17” monitor was relegated to my old desktop system, used for monitoring Outlook and Messenger and for Media Player duties.

If only I could have all three screens connected to my laptop ...

Enter DisplayLink

For some time, there have been proprietary graphics solutions for laptops which use PC Cards using the CardBus and Zoomed video abilities. Effectively you are adding a new graphics card to the system. These tended to be expensive and there was always the worry about driver availability for new operating systems.

DisplayLink takes a different route to enabling an external display by using a USB 2.0 interface. A desktop graphics driver delivers compressed video to a dedicated hardware decoder which has an analogue VGA output. Not only does this make it available to any laptop with USB 2.0, it also supports desktop systems without upgrading the main graphics card.

Cheap route to DisplayLink

I’d actually been following the progression of DisplayLink for some time in various www.pcpro.co.uk reviews, from the expensive Village Tronic ViBook (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/244438/village-tronic-vibook.html?searchString=vibook) at £130 to the more reasonable Kensington Dual Monitor Adapter (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/246230/kensington-dual-monitor-adapter.html?searchString=kensington) at £60.

Also, companies like Samsung have been selling external monitors which include smaller secondary screens powered by DisplayLink, as well as high end digital photo frames which include DisplayLink connectivity.

However, one of the PC Pro reviews included the comment it might be a better idea to search eBay for a Kensington USB docking station which supports video as these are normally available for less than the dedicated solutions.

My hardware

I spent a few months on eBay tracking Kensington docking stations with video, for the ‘right price’, and last week I finally won one in an auction for £20. The unit came with a power adapter, USB lead and the actual docking bar itself. In addition to DisplayLink the bar provides a 4-port powered USB 2.0 hub, audio and 10/100 networking

Docking Station - Front

Docking Station - Rear

The great news is that if all you are using is the DisplayLink connecter there is no need for the power adapter as the USB 2.0 connection provides the power.

The laptop is a HP 6910p (with 128Mb ATI Mobility Radeon X2300), 2.2GHz Core Duo, 4Gb RAM, with the advanced docking station providing simultaneous DVI and VGA outputs by default when the laptop lid is closed.

Drivers for Windows 7 RC 64-bit

One of my criteria for using DisplayLink was that the software had to work under Windows 7 as, since the beta release this has become my day to day operating system on my laptop. Even worse, it is a 64-bit installation which always makes one more wary of driver compatibility.

The good news was that the software drivers are available from the guys who make the hardware chip at http://www.displaylink.com rather than from Kensington. I thought I might be able to use a Vista 64-bit driver, but on the driver download page was a warning that it was not compatible with Windows 7. But right next to that warning was a link to a specific Windows 7 Preview driver.

By the time I finally won a Kensington docking station from eBay at the ‘right price’ my laptop had been upgraded to Windows 7 RC and the DisplayLink Windows 7 driver software had also been updated to a new release on 3 April 2009.

As with most USB devices, I ran the driver setup first (no reboot required) before plugging in the docking station. Various new hardware devices were detected, including the DisplayLink adapter. Only an AX88772 device wasn’t recognised, the ASIX USB 2.0 LAN controller.

A quick right click on the desktop, Screen Resolution, and there were three monitors on one laptop.

I enabled the monitor and took my first photo of three monitors running live on one laptop.

DisplayLink utility

Although you can configure the resolution and layout of the monitors within the standard Screen Resolution dialog, there is a special DisplayLink utility. This is installed during the driver setup but on my system was not added to the Start Menu. I found the utility files in, \Program Files\DisplayLink Core Software. Running DisplayLinkUI.exe provides a new icon in the system tray/notification area where you can control the DisplayLink specific options.

Colour Depth

Resolution

Rotation Options

During writing this blog post I decided to test whether the standard Windows 7 screen rotation options could be used instead of the DisplayLink utility menu. Big mistake, my other two displays went blank and it took a few dock/undocks and a DisplayLink driver uninstall and reinstall to get everything back to normal. Admittedly both Windows 7 and the DisplayLink drivers are both beta software so I’ll forgive them as long as the final releases work as expected.

CPU utilisation

The big downside with DisplayLink is that it uses the system CPU to compress the video it is sending to the hardware decoder. Kensington recommend at least a dual core CPU running at 1.2GHz and above. You do notice a bit of screen lag compared to the ‘real’ monitors but for applications like Outlook and Messenger work fine.

I decided to do a bit of simple benchmarking using Task Manager, tracking the core Display Link process, DisplayLinkManager.exe (you need to click on Show Process From All Users to view this).

Here are the results of my simple CPU utilisation tests,

Outlook and Messenger running in background < 1%

Windows Media Player playing MP3 files 10%

bbc.co.uk iPlayer video within a web page 15%

(Turkish Grand Prix 2005)

Windows Media Player MPEG4 video 30%

(Sebastien Lambla ASP.NET MVC best practices from VistaSquad user group)

Conclusion

What I wanted was a simple and cheap solution to providing a third display for my laptop which could handle background applications such as Outlook, Messenger or Twitter without compromising general performance. I’d say DisplayLink has achieved that with an elegant solution to a simple problem, all for £20 delivered thanks to eBay.

3G Mobile broadband - it's here and it's good

Liam Westley — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:04:16 GMT

Some months back I bought a HP 6910p laptop which included a HSDPA card, and it even came with a Vodafone SIM. I did look at the data plan from Vodafone; £15 per month for 3Gb of data, with no minimum contract.

I liked the idea of a larger data allowance than the 40Mb I currently have with my T-Mobile contract. I’ve never upgraded this original Web’n’Walk contract; I get 200 minutes, free answer phone collection and 40Mb of data for £16.50 per month. If I upgraded to get 1Gb of data (with laptop use) it would be closer to £40 per month.

I also was interested in having a backup method for Internet access. The BT Broadband in my office has suffered intermittent outages over the past month or so. A cheap, emergency backup connection which could handle substantial data transfers was tempting.

Then an e-mail arrived in my inbox which included a special offer for a 3G broadband deal from 3. When bought via Quidco (a cashback, co-operative web site) you could get a free Huawei E160G USB HSDPA dongle on an 18 month contract at half price monthly fees. That meant a 3Gb monthly contract was only £5. However, my sweet spot was a 5Gb monthly contract for £7.50. If you included the £12.50 cashback, even after a £5 annual membership fee for Quidco, the overall cost was £7.08 per month for that 5Gb of data.

Well, the dongle arrived last week. The first thing I did was to ignore the dongle and try the SIM card in the 3G built in to my HP laptop. With the HP Wireless Assistant I enabled the WWAN (3G) card and up popped the HP Connection manager application you use to connect to a WWAN. It came with configurations for all the major global network operators. I selected ‘Three UK’ as my network and clicked on connect. Then it was straight onto http://www.speedtest.net. It concluded I had a download speed of 1.3Mb/s and upload of around 350kb/s.

It turns out that my 3G wireless broadband was three times faster than my first ever broadband (cable broadband at 512kb/s, 128 kb/s). Even more astonishing it has an upload speed equal to my wired ADSL2 Sky Broadband Max connection.

Of course, that’s the first floor in my home in West London. In my first floor office near Kew Gardens station, which is a mobile signal dead spot, the speeds dropped; 750kb/s download and 300kb/s upload.

In the office, the HP laptop and dongle varied in performance much more than at my home. The HP laptop built in card suffered compared to the dongle. I found this surprising because I would have assumed the laptop, with 3G aerials built into the chassis, would come out on top, but it seemed the dongle obtains a better signal and therefore better performance. I suspect the laptop lid, being in a docking station beneath a monitor stand is shielded more than the dongle sticking out the side of the laptop.

In conclusion I’m very impressed by 3G mobile broadband. The dongle included drivers embedded as a USB mass storage device, and they worked first time (with a reboot) under Windows Vista 64-bit. Even better it works with the built in 3G card.

Never can I now claim not to be able to receive e-mails because I’m out of WiFi coverage. 3 even allow Skype usage – they encourage it, with a €1.02 coupon in the starter pack.

Even more interesting the inclusive 5Gb data plan is usable on any of the 3 networks globally. That includes Austria, Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland and Sweden. Now, if isn’t that an excuse to arrange that holiday ...

Benchmarking my external 2.5" drive (laptop) - USB 2.0 versus eSATA

Liam Westley — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:12:00 GMT

When I bought a new laptop, I immediately replaced the hard drive with something bigger, and not wanting to see a SATA notebook drive go to waste I bought an Akasa ENP2NES P2 series external enclosure. I've used their 3.5" enclosures for some time, but this was the first 2.5" version.

Even better, the enclosure had both eSATA and USB 2.0 ports. My Shuttle SD37-P2 barebones desktop includes an eSATA port, although combined with Intel Matrix RAID on that box, the 3.5" enclosures never got on with it. However, I decided to have a go with the 2.5" version.

Importantly I decided to use a disk drive benchmark program from www.datamarck.com to compare the USB 2.0 and eSATA performance. All these are for read access only.

USB 2.0 - 28 Mb/s average read, ranging from 30 Mb/s to 23 Mb/s

eSATA - 37 Mb/s average read, ranging from 48 Mb/s to 23 Mb/s

Only rough figures from a couple of runs on each, but that seals it - Virtual PC images on the external drive run on my Shuttle PC from now on. They will get faster disc access and hardware virtualisation which my Windows Server 2003 box (Shuttle SB51G) doesn't have.

Buying a new laptop - HP 6910p, accessories and Vista 64-bit

Liam Westley — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:59:12 GMT

After a month of owning my new laptop I've written up a series of posts 'Liam buys a new laptop' about how I made the choice of a HP 6910p laptop, what accessories I bought and my initial impressions of Vista 64-bit as an operating system.

Part 1 – Which one to buy?

Part 2 – Laptop inflation, accessories add another 50% - oops!

Part 3 – First impressions of my new Vista 64-bit development platform.

Liam buys a new laptop (Part 3) – First impressions

Liam Westley — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:48:38 GMT

Operating system installation

The first thing with any new PC is to configure the hard disc partitions, update the device drivers and get on with installing the rest of your software.

The HP backup and recovery wizard happily burnt my recovery DVDs which were tested on the upgraded 320Gb hard drive. The recovery process created a recovery partition, an o/s tools partition (quickly deleted) and installed Vista Business (32-bit) complete with all the HP drivers on a single huge 300Gb C: partition. A quick installation of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.5 Special Edition that came free with PC Pro magazine and I had resized the C: drive to 100Gb, and created two new 95Gb partitions for D: and E: drives.

The next step was to download all the 64-bit Vista drivers from the HP website, around five pages of downloads, around 70 file downloads. Good news, all the built in hardware is supported, so on went an MSDN licence of Vista Ultimate 64-bit. It all went very well even down to the SD card reader (normally a nightmare 64-bit driver area) and logging in with the finger print reader.

Other software

The great resource I had for the installation is the audit of software installations from my other PCs. I have a single Excel spreadsheet for every PC. This lists every item of software installed on each PC, including a download location (if free) and licence codes where relevant. A ‘shared’ spreadsheet keeps track of the multiple licence usage of software from my Microsoft Action Pack and Kaspersky Internet Security bundles.

It was easy to take the spreadsheet of installations from my 32 bit Vista development desktop, weed out the ‘old’ software I don’t use any more. Old software includes items such as Visual Studio 2005 now that 2008 is out and can compile to the .NET 2.0 framework.

The joy of virtualisation

The first software I installed (after drivers and Kaspersky) was Virtual PC 2007 and a 16Gb VHD disk image for my Windows XP/SQL Server 2000/Visual Studio 2003 development environment I use for my main client (don’t start me on spending most of my time in VS2003). That meant I had a working development environment for my main client up and running within 15 minutes. This is definitely the quickest that a new laptop I have owned has been ready for real development.

64-bit goodness and badness

I was ready for various software not to work under 64-bit Vista, but the only two real casualties are Firefox (shame on you guys, no 64-bit version of Firefox 3, and no plans for Firefox 4 either) and open source PDF Creator, the PDF printer driver I normally use to create PDF files. Fortunately IE7 has nearly caught up with Firefox, with tabbed browsing and opening multiple tabs from a favourite folder. I would rather have had Firefox, but let's hope they catch up soon.

The real surprise was explorer shell extensions like 7-Zip and TortoiseSVN come in 64-bit versions. Given the machine main purpose is for software development, the lack of TortoiseSVN would have been a showstopper. I’m just not a command line programmer, too lazy, so relying solely on SVN.EXE wouldn’t have been an option.

Of course the real advantage of Vista 64-bit is that I can finally have a 4Gb machine where I get to use all of the installed memory. My Vista 32-bit desktop only recognises 2Gb of the 4Gb of installed memory which is a crying shame when I want to use a virtual machine. With 4Gb available, I can now run my VS2003 virtual machine with 1.5Gb of dedicated RAM and still leave 2.5Gb for the host operating system. Hopefully the 4Gb should give me plenty of room to run Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, IIS apps, and still have one or two virtual machines running Windows Server 2008.

Summary

For just under £800 I think I’ve got a bargain power user laptop. The screen isn’t the biggest, but it’s a laptop I can carry in a standard briefcase or carry on flight bag, and the travel battery gives me around 5 hours heavy use and nearer 10 on standard office tasks. It’s got a very good keyboard, a 3G card ready for activation and a built in SD reader that can handle SDHC cards so I can use the 8Gb microSD from my phone without a dongle.

Liam buys a new laptop;

Liam buys a new laptop (Part 2) – Laptop inflation, accessories add another 50% - oops!

Liam Westley — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:41:58 GMT

In Part 1 of my blog series, I described the partisan decision process that led me to buy a new HP 6910p laptop. Having decided on teh laptop to buy, the only question, how much will it eventually cost?

There were always going to be immediate upgrades; the 120Gb hard drive was always going to be too small (it was replaced by a 320Gb model) and I was always going to replace the 2Gb of RAM with a 2 x 2Gb dual channel matched pair.

The unexpected bonus I had was managing to get hold of a model with a build in 3G HSPDA card. I haven’t activated the Vodafone SIM card, but at £15 per month with no contract (3Gb monthly limit) I’ll be sorely tempted if I end up working at a client which restricts my internet access.

So here is my BOM - a laptop including the accessories I arbitrarily deemed necessary in spite of the frown from my accountant (all prices include VAT and delivery charges);

HP 6910p Core2Duo 2.2Ghz,120Gb,2Gb,DVD+/-,14.1",3G Wifi	eBay	£507.50
Western Digital 320GB 2.5" Laptop Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 8MB - upgrade 120Gb hard drive	eBuyer	£79.97
2 x 2GB Corsair KIT DDR2 667MHz non-ECC (dual channel) Akasa AK-ENP2NES-SL eSata/USB 2.0 external drive caddy (for 120Gb drive	scan.co.uk	£78.69

HP basic docking station PA286A (for use at client site)	eBay	£20.49
HP advanced docking station PA287A (for home)	eBay	£31.00
HP advanced docking station PA287A (for Kew office)	eBay	£32.50

HP travel battery, extra 3.5 hours	eBay	£27.00

HP laptop hard drive caddy with screws	eBay	£4.20
TransFlash microSD Mini SD to SD & Mini SD - make that SD card slot take all SD formats as it is SDHC compatible	eBay (Hong Kong)	£2.00

	GRAND TOTAL	£783.35

I have to say, the HP hard drive caddy is a terribly frivolous purchase. This is a tiny amount of metal cladding to wrap a standard notebook drive that just makes it easy to swap the hard drive in the laptop. These can be hard to get hold off, so it’s a nice to have at what is quite a low price for something so esoteric.

The advanced docking station includes an ExpressCards slot, DVI video out, a multibay II drive bay (at home I added a spare DVD-ROM I had already had), the USB port with extra power pin (that means I can use my nc4010 DVD/CDRW external caddy in the office at Kew). Also, all the docking stations can use the DVI out and analog VGA simultaneously for dual screen use on two external monitors.

Even better, HP have reworked the concept of a second battery. No longer does it replace the DVD drive, but instead it clips onto the bottom of the laptop, very much like my travel battery for my old nc4010 ultraportable laptop. Where it improves on the nc4010 is that you can have the travel battery attached even when the notebook is in the docking station. This means the docking station can happily recharge both batteries.

Finally, I also reused a compact flash to PCCard adapter which I had from a Xircom CF network card bought for the very first HP iPaq, when CF was the only memory card standard around.

So I now have a 2.2GHz Core Duo, 1280 x 800 14.1” laptop with 4Gb RAM, 320GB hard drive, gigabit networking, WiFi a/b/g, Bluetooth, 3G data, an array of docking stations and a travel battery. A real road warrior work horse.

Liam buys a new laptop;

Liam buys a new laptop (Part 1) – Which one to buy?

Liam Westley — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:26:05 GMT

Just over month ago I finally upgraded from my aging HP nc6000 laptop. Equipped with a Pentium 1.6M and 1.5Gb it wasn’t an ideal platform for Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2008 or virtualisation engines. I was also really feeling the lack of dual core CPU oomph compared to my desktop setup.

I had been tracking a candidate for a replacement laptop for some months, a HP 6910, although I nearly bought a Dell Latitude D630 (but a waiting time of more than 60 days put me off). I knew I was in for a world of pain, as my nc6000 and nc4010 laptops all use the same power supplies and docking stations, all of which would be rendered obsolete by buying a newer model 6910p. Not only would I have to factor in the cost of the actual laptop, but all the 'bits' which I consider **essential** additions...

Why a HP 6910p? I have had nothing but good experiences with my previous HP laptops. I wanted one of the corporate models as they have longer warranties, more robust screen protection and can use docking stations. I like docking stations, at home, at the office; I even like them so much I drop spare ones at client sites, even if I only visit one day a fortnight. It's such a relief not to have to take a power supply with me everywhere I go, never mind the grief of connecting all the various network/monitor cables.

Corporate notebooks also tend to include a trackpoint as well as a trackpad. It’s a very subjective issue, but I can't get on with trackpads. As a touch typist you can tap them really easily with your thumbs, which means random cursor madness in Word. Not fun.

My other requirement is that the laptop should by under 2.5Kg in weight and fit my standard leather briefcase which is only about 5cm wide. I care about that more than having a large screen.

Finally, the HP scores on a few other points

The parts are easy to get and relatively cheap (compared to, say, Sony or Apple)
They support a wide range of drivers for your o/s (unbelievably this includes Windows 2000 Pro)
They are bulk bought by corporates with more money than sense, so there are lots of cheap spares available on eBay*

So that’s a decision - a HP 6910p laptop. It has some good reviews from various sites, while not managing a ‘best buy’ or ‘A-list’ award, it generally gets a solid ‘recommended’. Very HP, worthy rather than exciting.

Liam buys a new laptop;