I have for many years been using laptops with big screens and with a lot of power, but with the power and screen you also get a lot of weight and short battery life. So a little Christmas gift to myself was a new smaller laptop and I choose the new HP EliteBook 2730p which I'm so far very happy with. It has a nice form factor and weights 1,36 kg and an extra 0,56 kg for the extra 6-cell battery which is nicely attached to the bottom of the computer. The two batteries covers for a day of use without using the AC-adapter. It has a 12.1 screen with a 1280 x 800 resolution which is acceptable for running Visual Studio even if you always wants more :). It is one of the few tablet's that has a 5400 rpm hard disk (at least of the ones available here in Sweden) and together with 4 Gb RAM also the performance in Visual Studio is acceptable. The reason for buying this laptop wasn't primarily for running Visual Studio though, but rather to be a lighter alternative when I'm on meetings, holding presentations and other work that means that I won't be using Visual Studio that much anyway. I also like many of the details like the ..., a built in 2MP camera, SD card reader, a small lamp (very useful when it's dark and all you want is to see the keyboard), finger print sensor and the support for Wireless 802.11 draft-n network. The sound is not something that will make you jump of happiness and I also find all the applications installed by HP to be inconvenient.

I haven't used the tablet functionality so much yet, but I was happy when I learned that Windows 7 will have support for Swedish characters like å, ä and ö and also support Swedish text recognition.Windows 7 is also supposed to be more resource effective (faster, and not consuming so much memory) which is also interesting for a computer like this. After many positive blogs about the Windows 7 Beta, it might be worth trying out as my primary operating system for this laptop? I always have my HP MediaSmart Home Server to protect me and allowing me to fast and easily return to it's current state. Well ... it won't happen tonight so I guess I can sleep on it.