With some long haul coming up, I wanted to make a real effort to travel light. HP have helped with the release of the new HP ProBook 5310M. It contains, in a 1.78 kilo package; a 13.3 inch screen, an Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor, and either a 320GB 7200 rpm standard hard drive, or a Solid State Drive.
Previously the only option, for a small but light and powerful laptop was the HP 2530p. The 5310M weighs in at 70 grams heavier, but for that small compromise you get a bigger screen, display port, and a cheaper price, coming in at only $1635 + GST for model VT138PA. There are some small downsides. The 5310M comes with a piano black finish that shows finger marks too readily, and only comes standard with 2GB of RAM, and only has one DIMM slot, limiting expansion.
Start-up time is important to me (those who know me would know of my lack of patience when it comes to slow technology) and the HP 5310M is fast, booting into Windows 7 in less than 20 seconds. However for those who can’t wait there is an instant-on Internet browser and connector into Outlook that takes about 4 seconds – great for those who just want to know if they can meet at a certain time, or quickly lookup an email or task.
For work, I usually use an HP EliteBook 8500 and run three monitors from it. On the “travel laptop”, I wanted to ensure that my “My Documents” folder travelled with me. I quickly found two methods to achieve this: Windows Live SkyDrive or Microsoft Live Mesh (beta). Both do a sterling job at giving me heaps of storage in the cloud; Skydrive: 25 GB, and Live Mesh: 5GB. Both also make it easy to keep all your files in sync. The advantage of the in-beta Live Mesh is that you can download your files from anywhere, whereas with SkyDrive, you need to setup a sync.
To sync my internet favourites I have used xmarks – very easy to setup and it “just works”. Having got the new laptop, I am now working on slimming my Outlook data size to less than one GB, and sorting out a more logical data layout for work data.