The First look at my HP 6710b

Hey.... Finally it arrived... My HP Compaq 6710b, not that I had to wait long, but I am an anxious man, and the wait was already too much when I knew that it has been delivered home but I couldn't see it before I finished office on Friday.

Its really the latest technology stuff..

• Intel Core 2 Duo, 4MB L2 Cache and 800 Mhz FSB
  
• 2 GHz Processor
• 2 GB RAM : Max 4GB
• 15.4" Widescreen
• Gigabit LAN, Bluetooth, All that stuff...
• Windows Vista Business Pre-Installed

The first reaction after startup was, "Vista takes whole lot of time in initial setup. Quite a few reboots, and lots of time". However, when it showed up, the GUI looked familiar... to a Mac I have seen with a friend.

When I was reading the initial reviews about Vista that MS has tried to imitate the GUI of Mac, I didn't really believe that was true, but then when I saw it, I had to say that the critics were right. The Vista interface is much like Mac and various other features are matching to Linux distributions.. e.g. Ubuntu...

One of the biggest problems I faced was with Networking. I had to network this system with my old Dell running Win-XP home SP2 and my external Hard disk, which I intend to share between the two systems.

It was an unbelievably complex task, I had to say, much to my disappointment. Well, I have one router, two laptops, how much more simple home network can get. I expected it to automatically find that out and suggest me that it would put them into some network.

It did not, and I had to spend hours to find out what to do.. So many reboots, stuff like that.

Eventually it worked, but intermittently, sometimes I could see the other system and access things, other times, it was plain simple impossible to get through. Its wierd.. I can imagine why people say with mac and linux (ubuntu), "It just works", because Windows doesn't seem to... :(

As an example, One fine moment my system decides not to see the other laptop, then I have to open a command prompt, do a

ping -a

to the other system (my older Dell), and then the two systems can talk to each other just fine...

Very Wierd...

Well, my next problem was (and still is) trying to partition my huge hard disk. I've got 160GB there, out of which some was already taken up during Vista installation, but I need to partition my hdd to organize it better. Simple.

But, But, there doesn't seem to be a single program available in market which allows partition management for Vista. I tried partition magic.. but it doen't work with Vista. Great. and they dont have a Vista compatible version yet.

I cant go ahead and install my application software (e.g. Oracle server, other tools) in C drive as such, especially since its a 100+ GB partition and the only partition in system.

I tried the "shrink" option from Vista, but it doesn't allow me partitions with space limits that I like. For some "God knows why" kind of reason, shrinking doesnt allow the boot partition to be smaller than 80 GB.. I dont want to waste that much of my HDD space on boot partition...

I dont know when can I get that done... may be when I try to install Ubuntu, I do some more partitioning than required for Ubuntu only...

will keep posting...

cheers
raghav..