see you soon

Best of luck with your purchase. I’d suggest you install Debian Etch rather than Sarge – it should provide better support for various features.

I decided to buy one and maybe it will be delivered still this week 🙂

The smartcard-reader should be located in the lower-right corner over the dvd-tray.

I tend to install debian sarge or ubuntu gutsy (hardy, after stable release), still don’t know exactly, but I will report if I note irregularities. A Thinkpad is an other class of Laptop and was out of budget, thus I have to accomodate with a 14″ at least non-glare display 😉

thank you and see you soon, when I have finished my report 🙂

I haven’t experimented with the smartcard-reader (I didn’t even realise there is one! do you mean an SD card reader by any chance?).

One of the other guys in the office uses it on a day to day basis and seems happy enough with it – he has had some instabilities which he suspects are due to the Intel wireless card – I haven’t had a chance to update the Debian install on it to current stable though so I’m not sure its a hardware problem per-se.

Personally, I’m not a fan of widescreen laptops – but that seems to be unavoidable these days. I’m currently using a Lenovo T60 myself (I haven’t had a chance to blog about it) and have been very happy with that on Linux and Windows (but I haven’t configured up some of the more exotic items in it such as the fingerprint scanner).

I hope that helps a little.

thank you for your report, are you still happy with your choice of the laptop? I plan to buy one and search for experiences of other users.

other question: do you have some new information about the smartcard-reader and its support on debian? Other reviews are quite pessimistic :-/

ando

The problem with shutdown is due to pcmouse. This can be solved by lsmod -r psmouse before shutdown, or see some of the other reports for HP Compaq models, i think the 6230 or 6320 has a scrip that you can install and it works well afterwards.

Kevin

It sounds like a bad battery to me. This is particularly unlucky given the care you seem to be taking of your battery – you seem to be following the battery best care practices to the letter (much more-so than I ever do, to be honest!). The good news is that your battery should be fully covered by warranty if it’s less than 12 months old so I’d say give HP a call and see about replacing it. There may also be a HP tool for checking the status of batteries on newer laptops – http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=ie&prodTypeId=321957&prodSeriesId=1847703&prodNameId=1847704&swEnvOID=1093&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=ob-40703-1 this should give you some diagnostic info on the state of the battery and is probably worth running before contacting HP support.

hth,

-stephen

I’ve had it for about 8 months now, and have looked after it – no contact with water, etc, to stuff it up, and I even (usually) take the battery out when I know I’m just going to be running my notepad on AC power.

The other day, I took the battery out (after being in the laptop for maybe a week). It was out for no longer than 24hrs, before I had to move my laptop, so I stuck it back in, and it claimed that the battery was 64% full. Although I didn’t look at how full it was prior to me taking it out in the first place, I can usually leave it out for a week or so, and it’ll still be about 90% or so full.

So that was the first strange thing. THEN – after plugging it into my notepad (which was connected to AC power), it would appear to charge. But this would only last between 30-90seconds, before it would resume to full AC power, with no charging to the battery.

I’m confused. I’m thinking that the battery is actually quite full (hence the reason it doesn’t charge it), and instead, my notepad is incorrectly regestering it at a lower percentage.

Thanks for any insights you can give me!

Elly

If you’re not comfortable with those instructions you probably want to take it to a local laptop shop where they should be able to help you.