Got a new laptop for Father’s Day.

HP Pavilion dv6700. Dual core Turion 64. nvidia graphics. 16×9 screen. 3gb memory and a 250gb drive.

Came installed with Windows Vista Home Premium edition. Preinstalled with Service Pack 1.

I have almost no experience with pre-SP1 versions of Vista, so take this with a grain of salt. I like Vista. Caveats:

- it’s running on a computer designed for the OS, and it’s a pretty fast computer.

- I like the Windows OS, and have been using it since 3.1.

I’m using it with the goofy, graphics-intensive interface, and it looks nice and is fairly snappy. I’m sure the performance would improve greatly if I turned that off, but as of yet, I don’t see the need.

Although they’ve moved some stuff around, it was still very easy to find it all. Uninstalling all the OE software and the Norton security suite (something I do with every computer) was fairly simple, but time-consuming. It took almost 4 minutes to uninstall the Norton stuff, and I’m still not sure I got all of it.

I’ve installed Firefox 3.0 release candidate (my apoligies to Tiffny for maligning her noble employer’s name), Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org (which now runs VERY fast), Allegro 2002 (which STILL say it crashes when it closes, but works nonetheless), and PaintShop Pro.

All the software seems to be working fine. The real test will be when Digidesign approves ProTools LE for Vista, and I try audio editing on this machine. If that works, I’ll be elated. Not sure if the small Firewire port will work with my audio interface … if not, I’ll be slightly less elated.