Samir's new HP Pavilion

Samir came home today with his new notebook which has the same shape and size as the MacBook Pro but is slightly lighter. It was some limited edition copper-red design that’s was available this month in the HP stores. 250GB HDD, 3GB RAM, 1.83 C2D and NVIDIA 8400GS with Home Premium.

Samir didn’t listen to my advice and didn’t feel compelled to buy the MacBook, to end up buying a HP. The laptop’s quite decent but like I’ve said time and again, it just cannot be compared with the MacBook because it’s a different platform.

He used Ubuntu for a while; he was impressed by the Compiz Desktop Manager, but almost nothing else seemed to excite him. Then he used Mac OS X which he hasn’t used before because he doesn’t know anyone else with a Mac. He discovered Spaces when he dragged windows to the screen edges, and Expose when he played around with the function keys which have icons that look more interesting than they do on regular laptops.

While staying over last night, he loved using my computer but did not regret buying the PC notebook because it could run “PPTs and Word Docs like he wanted them to”. I told him about Office 2008, and he was a little shocked and therefore went onto asking something anyone would: Can’t I replace Windows with this?

Unfortunately, yes and no. Yes using the OS X x86 project ISOs and no because it doesn’t offer full compatibility like his Network Adapter was incompatible which I realized looking at the hardware compatibility list.

Now talking about his laptop. Using this Mac for more than 7 months now, I’m used to all of it’s functions to such an extent that when I want to scroll on any other laptop including his, I place two fingers and am shocked to see nothing happen till I realize my mistake. The same thing with the secondary click.

We did a good speaker test, his speakers were only marginally louder which is good for Samir but nothing to feel bad about for me.

Apart from that, we watched Into the Wild during the short period Nitin was there with us, which is so refreshing after seeing Juno. Nitin agreed saying Juno was a little scary. Samir, not so much. Nitin’s busy wondering whether or not to buy an 80 Gigabyte iPod Classic because he doesn’t have open access to computers in Mumbai and cannot continue using his 4GB iPod Nano. In other news, Samir actually went and bought an Apple product, an iPod nano which he used to criticize earlier :)

Had great fun yesterday, after writing a great Computer Systems Architecture paper the previous day. Now I hope to write another great paper on Saturday. Calculus II this time. Finney and Kreyszig, here I come.