Posted 11/14/2009 at 05:03:09am

Playing Warcraft with 12 million other people who couldn't give a rat's @ss about this game....

Posted 07/02/2009 at 11:56:22pm

I bought this laptop for my wife in March [2009] at Best Buy marked down to $900.  I'm not sure what full price was, but I'm not sure I would have paid more than $1k for it.

The fact is I knew this thing wasn't going to be a workhorse when I bought it because I knew my wife's demands of a PC... Office Suite, taking notes at meetings (hence the touch), surfing the internet, listening to music and watching videos.  She's not going to be using this machine for any gaming, video encoding, photoshopping, etc.  And HP doesn't advertise this machine as the machine to do it (and honestly, I really dislike HP and wouldn't buy one unless it was a deal).

I was holding out for the Asus T101 (T91 is just too small), which has yet to be released.  As a netbook, yes it'll be lighter, but it'll be signifcantly slower and significantly less flexible software/drivers wise where I have full control with Windows.  And I really wasn't counting on the price being much lower than $900 with the T91 already rumored to sell for around $750.  So comparitively, this is a better machine IMHO.

As for the machine:
-Is it slow?  It can be.
-Is it heavy for its size? A little.  The better question is can you hold the five pounds in your arm for an extended period of time for the tablet use?  I didn't realize holding five pounds was so tough, but as a mother of 3 and already holding a baby all day long, my wife has yet to complain.
-Is it loud?  Eh, I've heard worse.
-Does HP customer service suck? When hasn't it... you only buy HP if you know how to fix it on your own.
-Does it run Windows 7?  Took some work with the drivers, but yep.

For basic use, and particularly if you can find it marked down, this IS the touchscreen laptop to buy (can't believe I just recommended an HP).  If you're looking to buy a touchscreen that's more multipurpose to do gaming, photoshop, etc... this IS NOT the laptop to buy (not sure why you'd want a touchscreen for that... but to each his own), but I think that's obvious even without this MPC review.  You're not going to find a mobile machine with all the horsepower to do everything well in this price range anyhow.

Posted 05/13/2009 at 10:36:05pm

Just want to echo Cache's points on Firefox and add that Chrome currently does not natively support Windows 7 x64 (meaning... it'll work, but it takes some googling and some work to fidget with it).  Although I suspect this will be fixed by release time, it's a huge downer at the moment.

Posted 04/07/2009 at 08:07:17pm

It looks as though the writer of this article has developed a website or two, but clearly hasn't developed sites all that long to understand why the web does what it does.  Having developed literally THOUSANDS of websites over the past 15 years for companies ranging from Microsft and the US Air Force to many, many small business websites, I can agree with most of your statements, but lets make an attempt to clear up two points that really matter here:
table tag -- You're making quite a <b>bold</b> statement here declaring the developers of hundreds of millions of websites wrong for using the table tag.  We'll just start then by first saying tables are NOT the most misused tag of all time.  And bogging down page size has never really been an issue (hence the point of HTML), as most of america has upgraded to some sort of broadband... tables never bogged down narrowband anyhow so your point there is moot.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html&
Looks like you drew your conclusion from the last paragraph of the introduction, which also states that you should not use tables as the ONLY means... it never said not at all.  The reason tables have been used and are still widely used today is simply for the fact they work... on EVERY browser (this quote cracks me up "Now that CSS has been refined and is compatible with all browsers"... really?  Show me CSS support on older browsers), and developing for a broad clientele for every browser is far more important than using a styled DIV (oh suddenly the days of good ol' Netscape Navigator come to mind... which parts of the government STILL use today on NT4 networks!).  Sure, this website's demographic may be able to get away with it, but most certainly not most international demographics or those sites who cater to selling products to people who bought computers 10 years ago and their computers continue to work fine for them (I know it's sad, but it's true).  I love CSS and code with it daily, but lets apply our dear CSS on DIVs in IE6 which I hate to say, but a large portion of the world still uses.  Bear in mind our beloved CSS3 is still in its infancy and is yet to even be fully compliant on every browser.  Tables are not misused, they're critical!  An experienced web developer knows this.
b, i and u tags -- your comments here are hilarious and clearly <u>underline</u> your lack of experience in the field (let me harass you just a little :P).  These tags are important for search engines that crawl the web such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Sure, once you have an established PageRank and you're in the search engine systems it's safe to gradually remove these elements, but on a new site... again, they're critical!  Anyone who understands SEO will know this.
Yes, stylesheets are wonderful, but this is a classic case where looks aren't everything.  There is an effective balance of design and code for every project, but that's up to a skilled developer to find.  I wrote articles like this blindly in 2003 for a large e-commerce platform, but later learned that the cutting edge doesn't cater to everyone.  Get some more development time under your belt and you'll learn as well.  Best of luck to you.