HP’s Windows Vista Compatible Laptops
7So I happen to have an HP 2120us Windows XP Media Center Edition Laptop that is Vista Compatible. I also happen to be a Microsoft Partner, so with the release of Windows Vista, I got a copy of Windows Vista Business to try out and play with before I start advising my clients on it. Now I have used Windows Vista Ultimate before in another Microsoft Partner pack, and I was pretty happy with that version despite the fact that it was beta. Windows Business doesn’t fall much short; it covers all the features except for some media add-ons here and there, which would useful primarily for a technology enhanced Western household. Anything east of the UK, and people wouldn’t really understand the benefits of some of the features offered by Windows Vista Ultimate.
For all people who are considering upgrading their HP Laptops to Vista though, there may be several minor issues. HP provides drivers for all the hardware, but most of the not-so-useful software that HP bundled with their Media Center Edition pre-Install can also be found on the web. But one of their most useful inventions, HP Quickplay, is not available once you upgrade from Windows XP to Windowss Vista. Now the Pavillion dv Edition laptops are configured for HP Quickplay, and they have a Quickplay button on them; it’s just really weird having the button on there but no Quickplay itself.
I’ve gotten a hold of HP Customer support, I’ve searched all over the web, and HP Quickplay is hard to come by. HP Customer service flat out said that Quickplay is not available UNLESS you simply recover yur original OS and it’s complied into that installation. If you upgrade, you will be unable to take advantage of HP Quickplay, and apparently, HP has no intention of offering the software standalone in the future. Now, I’m an HP laptop kind of a guy, but this move on HP’s part is absolutely ridiculous.
This further complicates things for people with HP Laptops and Windows Vista, because unless you’re upgrading to Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, you’re not going to have any DVD reading or writing codecs, and who wants to pay for those, again, when you already paid for them as part of your original laptop purchase.
How to go by this issue; you can try and put your recovery hard drive partition on your laptop onto CDs, because once you’ve installed Vista, you can see the recovery partition, but you can’t access it (I haven’t tried figuring this one out yet, it probably has something to do with NTFS and FAT32). Then you can try installing some of the software from your recovery drive. It may or may not work. The point is that HP’s service in the matter is currently poor, and I’m not sure they plan on changing that unless you buy a laptop which comes pre-installed with Vista.
