I just bought an expensive laptop - was it a $2500 mistake?

[Raffy_Taffy]

You want serious speed? I hope you got a solid state hard drive and not a disk HD.

Unfortunately, HP - and Dell, too - don't offer SSH drives in their top of the line laptop, not yet. Dell does offer it in one of their netbooks. The HP HDX18 does have an HDMI input, which is nice.

you say it has an hdmi input? i thought the same thing, but have not been able to use it. how do i use this feature?

[ocgw]

You want serious speed? I hope you got a solid state hard drive and not a disk HD.

Unfortunately, HP - and Dell, too - don't offer SSH drives in their top of the line laptop, not yet. Dell does offer it in one of their netbooks. The HP HDX18 does have an HDMI input, which is nice.

Sony does 8)

The only mistake you made is asking in an open forum w/ maybe some "college kids" if they think you spent too much money?, you can only ask such questions of peers

If you make $50-100k pr year your pov on money is totally different than if you are living in a dorm or moms basement

I personally would have bought the bare bones quad laptop (it was what I recommended to my dad), but I wouldn't call it a mistake, I would call it an extravagance, & as long as your bills are paid, & your dependents are taken care of and it makes you happy that is all that matters, I think a guy should live a little, you only live once

Enjoy your new toy, or should I say new tool

ocgw

peace

[RabidDog]

You want to work away from home 3 -4 days a week? better get a very long lead. This thing wont last 90 mins on batts. Too big, too heavy, too powr hungry. Triple raided intel SSD's will get you everything you need @ $1299

[DereX888]

With SSD's failure rate of 30% I don't think triple-RAID SSDs is enough of insurance

[deadrats]

Tom Cruise can't handle the truth. He's gay but won't admit it.

So did I make a mistake in ramping up a $1300 laptop to the tune of $2500?

Probably. What was the base configuration? Which quad core CPU did you get? What OS?

Forgot to mention that it came with a 7200rpm hard drive and the GPU is a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 130M card.

BTW, that model, brand and the worthiness and/or quality of that card is not known to me. I'm not a dummy, but I'm not an all around geek, either. (Nothing wrong with geekiness, some hot chicks have a thing for geeks.)

the gpu is definitely a good thing, it fully supports cuda applications:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_130m_us.html

including video editing/transcoding apps and from a few of adobe's apps, like photoshop.

between the quad core processor, 8 gigs of ram and that gpu, with the right software, i think you will be very happy.

[bigmutt]

I have the same laptop, but without the 8gb RAM. I love it. It does not roast my lap; it only runs 1:20 on battery but I'm never off line-power that long so it doesn't matter. (I think of it as my 1-hr UPS)
It's a lovely unit with backlit keyboard (nice for propping it up on my stomach/knees while I lay in bed surfing the web); fingerprint reader; full 1080P definition; great sound; watching full HD BluRay movies; burning BR discs; two 500GB 7200rpm HDD units; integrated HiDef TV tuner; eSata and HDMI ports; and lots of other nice features.

$2500 does seem excessively high, as I paid much less than that and it included free Win7 Pro upgrade. But make no mistake: it's a nice unit and if portability is at all an issue, it's as close to a decent desktop as you can get. My two Dell laptops (XPS1330 & 1340) have been left in the dust.

(btw, it can be configured with solid state drives, but it was out of my price range)