Sunday, August 21, 2005
CompUSA Auctions and HP a530n
I'm trying to check every little thing on the computer and it is coming up pretty much roses. A floppy drive is something the other HP doesn't have and is something I've read is good to have for a Linux conversion (planned for either this machine or the Dell). It works fine and when CompUSA puts them on sale I'll have to replenish my stock.
I needed to take some pictures and had been putting it off (more on my citizen journalism project later). This weekend I finally found the time to do that and hook up the a530n to a flat screen monitor. The pictures look great on this screen with the finer resolution. CompUSA has a 17 inch LCD on sale this week (with a free printer!) at a pretty good price that even a tightwad like me would consider. This computer has just a basic video card but it does a great job for what I need. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a gamer so I can't really put the card to a test. Maybe I'll scrape something off the web to see how it works. Something to have some fun with instead of just benchmarking it.
The HP camera gave me a reason to check out the card reader in this HP computer. I used both the USB 2.0 and the SD card slot. I don't have any devices that use any of the other cards so I didn't check them. But my theory is that if the buss works for these two, the other seven will work also.
Now for the one sour note. When I got the other HP, I willy-nilly installed all the software for the HP devices (camera and PSC). This time I decided to simply try the HP software that came pre-installed on the computer for the camera. It worked fine except afterwards I got one of those dreaded undetermined device driver crashes of the computer. The crash appears to be associated with the HP software connecting to an online server (my Google home page came up with the error message).
I haven't installed any software besides the basic Real Player and Quicktime off the web. I haven't installed the software for the HP printer and the monitors are all plug and play. I haven't even installed the software for the other camera. My updates are all current, Windows and HP. I'm doing the HP ones myself since I've disabled the auto feature on that. I'm kinda at a loss on this one. I've been using the computer a bunch for other things besides the camera without any problems since then. ¶ 8/21/2005 11:24:00 PM
I needed to take some pictures and had been putting it off (more on my citizen journalism project later). This weekend I finally found the time to do that and hook up the a530n to a flat screen monitor. The pictures look great on this screen with the finer resolution. CompUSA has a 17 inch LCD on sale this week (with a free printer!) at a pretty good price that even a tightwad like me would consider. This computer has just a basic video card but it does a great job for what I need. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a gamer so I can't really put the card to a test. Maybe I'll scrape something off the web to see how it works. Something to have some fun with instead of just benchmarking it.
The HP camera gave me a reason to check out the card reader in this HP computer. I used both the USB 2.0 and the SD card slot. I don't have any devices that use any of the other cards so I didn't check them. But my theory is that if the buss works for these two, the other seven will work also.
Now for the one sour note. When I got the other HP, I willy-nilly installed all the software for the HP devices (camera and PSC). This time I decided to simply try the HP software that came pre-installed on the computer for the camera. It worked fine except afterwards I got one of those dreaded undetermined device driver crashes of the computer. The crash appears to be associated with the HP software connecting to an online server (my Google home page came up with the error message).
I haven't installed any software besides the basic Real Player and Quicktime off the web. I haven't installed the software for the HP printer and the monitors are all plug and play. I haven't even installed the software for the other camera. My updates are all current, Windows and HP. I'm doing the HP ones myself since I've disabled the auto feature on that. I'm kinda at a loss on this one. I've been using the computer a bunch for other things besides the camera without any problems since then. ¶ 8/21/2005 11:24:00 PM
