Sorry, I didn’t catch that in your post. Yeah that will work fine.
I was going to recommend waiting for a haswell retina macbook pro, but then I looked at the price on the HP-- that thing is super cheap.
It’s not quite as cheap as it first appears, since the starting price is for the 1366 x 768 display, no bluetooth, and a Intel HD 4600 GPU. Add the 1920 x 1080 display, a GT 740m, bluetooth, and a backlit keyboard and it’s $1020. I spent $1100 because I bought it pre-built exactly like that from a reseller, rather than custom from HP, but he shipped the same day, and he put a 2x2 Wifi card into it, when HP card is 1x1. The 256 GB mSata SSD adds $200, for a total of $1300. I suppose I could have purchased a 2.5" SSD and tried to sell to the 1 TB drive on eBay.
But yeah, even so, it’s $500 less than the 15" MacBook Pro, and $900 less than the Retina MacBook Pro. Not that the MacBook Pro would have been in the running, since part of the experiment is to see if a touchscreen makes a difference on a laptop. It sure makes a big difference in how easy it is to use the iPad away from a desk.
I received the laptop. I’m really, really regretting it.
First off, my initial reaction to Windows 8 is I hate it. It feels like I’m running someone’s first attempt at loading a GUI on top of DOS. It likes cryptic keyboard shortcuts, and typing out program names. Windows 8 “apps” insist on taking over the entire screen, with no provision for keeping something else open at the same time, which is incredibly DOS like. It hides things in the corners of the desktop with no icons to let you know there’s an option there. Hell, half the time the corner stuff doesn’t show up because I’m not clicking in the right spot.
It set up my computer to be password protected, which I didn’t want. I turned “ask for a password on wake” off, and it still requires a password on wake. Microsoft has hidden much in the way of essential capabilities. Hiding crap like Search and Settings in the lower right hand corner with no icon is as unintuitive as it gets.
OK. OS gripes aside, the laptop itself was a bad decision. My plan to have a dual-drive system is a failure so far. I popped the mSata SSD into it, and Windows saw it immediately, which is good. The problem is that I’m finding it very difficult to install Windows on the SSD. I’ve done it before with desktops, it wasn’t hard. But here, it is.
The BIOS is crippled. You can’t specify drive order for booting, only gross categories of devices. There’s acknowledgement that the mSata slot exists. I was expecting a normal BIOS, where you can say “drive 1 boots first,” and I can’t. This is true in both UEFI and Legacy modes.
The system didn’t come with a Windows disk, which ticks me off. I created a recovery CD, and the recovery CD won’t recognize the mSata drive. It knows about drive 0, but not drive 1. If I remove the hard drive, leaving just the mSata, it says it can’t do anything. The recovery CD is, frankly, crap, which I suppose is a Windows 8 problem, not the laptop’s problem.
OK, one small bright note: I found instructions on how to disable that stupid lock screen, so the laptop turns on instantly when I open it, instead of making me jump through hoops and type a password. It requires frigging regedit, but it can be done.
Microsoft is high on my shit list right now.
I was afraid to comment after you decided :(. Can you send it back?
Honestly… You can get a 256mb rMBP from B&H for like 1800ish right now. If you’re in to photography editing I think you’d like the Retina’s display.
If I wanted to give up on gaming entirely, the Vaio Pro 13 seems like a better answer. Cheaper, and a lot lighter. Not to mention I wouldn’t have to buy Photoshop a second time.
I’m so used to tinkering with hardware that it’s a big surprise when fairly basic things don’t work. I’m really, really surprised at how crippled the BIOS is, most of the controls I’m used to aren’t there. I know it can be done, since there are guys on the NotebookCheck Forum who have their HP Envy’s booting from large mSata SSD’s. What I don’t know is how they’ve managed it.
I’ve got feelers out for solutions to the mSata problem at both Microsoft and NotebookCheck. I don’t intend to give up immediately, though Jebus, this has been a lot harder than it should be.
The touchscreen isn’t looking as valuable right now. Mainly because Windows 8 sucks so much, which is about a lot more than the ugly Metro start screen Microsoft is pushing. It’s got problems even if you stick to the conventional desktop entirely. That, and touch support is spotty. I kept fighting Firefox, because it couldn’t decide whether a swipe in the browser window meant scroll (which I wanted) or select a block of text (which I didn’t want).
As for a return, I bought it from a small Amazon merchant for speed reasons, not HP. HP would probably take it back easily, but I don’t know about this guy. I’d have to call, his Amazon page has no details on his return policy. At least the SSD is from Newegg, and it’s listed as being under the standard return policy. Which means I’ll be out 15%, or $30. If the laptop has a similar 15% fee, that’s another $150.
I fought the laptop, and the laptop lost! I have conquered my purchase. For now.
I never did figure out how to get Windows to install, but I did end up spending $20 to get some software that purported to cleanly clone Windows to the SSD, Paragon Migrate OS to SSD. It worked, except that the laptop refused to boot to the SSD, and the BIOS refused to see it as a boot option. So the EFI boot partition that Paragon created wasn’t useful.
After going round and round for some time, I learned how to revise my boot control data (aka BCD) in the EFI partition. The laptop is still looking at the hard disk for the BCD, but the BCD now says “boot from the mSata drive.” And it works, it takes about 10 seconds to do a cold boot now.
I upped the scaling to 150%, since my 1920 x 1080 screen is 142 DPI, which is about 50% higher than Windows expects. This makes Touch control of the desktop much easier. The icons and spacing are about comparable to the iPad at this setting.
I installed trial versions of Start8 and Modern Mix. Start8 of course is the start menu and bypass the Metro start screen, and Modern Mix tames so-called “Modern” apps so they run in windows, and thus play nicely with the rest of the desktop. Modern my ass, they should have called them MSDOS-2013 Apps.
Classic Shell is a free alternative to Start8, by the way. That’s what I’m using.
I may use that, but I’m definitely using Modern Mix. I’ve only been using it a short time, and I’m already seeing the benefits. For example, Windows 8 decided it needed to tell me about updates. I say “sure, install those updates” and it pops up a Modern app. Which would have taken over my entire screen, but Modern Mix nabbed it and put it in a window, so I could move it out of the way and continue installing Steam games.
I was curious about CPU performance, so I grabbed a CPU benchmark. While these things are hardly predictive of real performance, my desktop CPU (an i7-950) scored 5940 overall, and the laptop CPU (i7-4700MQ) scored 8903. I suspect it’s mostly that it will go to higher clock speeds on demand, even if the “normal” clock speed is lower. There’s about 3 years between the two, but the newer CPU is designed with the limitations of laptops in mind.
EDIT: I should mention that CPU is only a concern because of photoshop. I installed CS 5.1, and it runs it like a boss.
The NVidia GT 740m does not appear to work. It’s not on the list of display adapters, there’s no NVidia control panel, when I downloaded the appropriate driver it couldn’t find the card, and there’s a malfunctioning, unidentified “3D controller” in Device Manager. I’ll explore further tomorrow, but I suspect I have to return it.
Which shouldn’t be too awkward since almost all of the software I’ve installed has been on the SSD. The hard disk is very close to the way it was when it arrived. Still pisses me off, though. Not checking that the video drivers are installed correctly is gross incompetence.
Before returning it check your BIOS to ensure that it’s set to switchable graphics.
It’s already returned, but the BIOS is extremely limited. I don’t recall seeing any Optimus options at all, just as it didn’t allow for setting SATA mode or drive order. A quick search shows that the InsydeH20 BIOS doesn’t allow control of Optimus.
Not my screenshot, but this is what my bios looked like:
EDIT: I very seriously thought about asking for a refund rather than a replacement. Battery life wasn’t what I expected, a test showed I can expect about 4 hours of light use, less than half the claimed 9.5 hours. I do not think I’ll be using this thing casually the way I do my iPad, it’s too big. There are lightweight 13" gaming laptops with better specs except for the touchscreen, laptops that don’t have a deliberately crippled BIOS.
In the end, though, I decided I’d stick with the touchscreen experiment. The iPad has me poking my Alienware screen all the time and then belatedly realizing that’s not going to work.
Reading through your original post again, where you repeatedly say you want something ipad-ish, that suspends cleanly, and can still play some games, I would get a 13" macbook air. No touchscreen, but it does have the best touchpad in the market, and you can reboot with bootcamp to play windows games. Super-light, super-sexy, reasonably priced, and crazy battery life. You can run photoshop etc in parallels just fine.
No touchscreen = not iPadish. Touchpads aren’t remotely like touchscreens, I hate 'em.
13" Macbook Air doesn’t have a discrete GPU. If I were to go that route, I’d rather a Vaio Pro 13. Lighter, and it has a touchscreen. Battery life is decent as well, not quite MacBook Air levels unless you add the sheet battery, which brings the weight up to that of the Air and gives it 25% longer battery life.
The vaio pro 13 has a 4400, versus the 5000 in the MBA. Pretty sizable performance gap there. The vaio pro also has a 7 hour battery life, versus ~12 on the MBA. The sheet battery doesn’t lie flush with the machine. But if your heart is set on a touchscreen, macs are out.
“Sizeable” is a 20% difference, according to Anandtech. Real world battery life is 7 hours vs. 10, not 12, according to reviews I’ve read. All manufacturers claim better battery life than you’ll really get, though HP sure was extreme in this case (9.5 vs. 4).
Yes, the touch screen is a requirement. If I were to give up on the touch screen, rather than the discrete GPU, I might as well get a proper replacement for the Alienware M11x, like a Sager np7330. Lightweight, 13", 4x the GPU power of the Air, and 2x the CPU power. Crap battery life, which is unfortunate, but I haven’t seen anything that exactly corresponds to the m11x in the current generation.
10 hours is the 11" macbook air, the 13" model gets a couple hours more.
Clevo is releasing a haswell Gt3e model in the next week or two. It should have great battery life and decent performance, but starts around $1400 without a SSD. I don’t think it has a touchscreen either.
Literally you are crying out for rev. 2 Surface Pro. Can you wait a few months?
That is true, but the new surface pro isn’t even announced yet. We all know it’s coming, but nobody knows when.