This is my first real post 🙂
So, our school bought 30 HP550 notebooks, with the idea that we could use 5 of them in each Year 5 and 6 classroom. We ordered them Tuesday… they arrived Friday (don’t you just love speedy delivery?)
Here’s the HP website with the specs of the laptop: http://tinyurl.com/cwnqyc
Now, all the computers we have in our school run off an Image, and the image is the same as the other schools nearby with the exception of a few files, each laptop takes about 45minutes to image and set up to be working with our school (most of the time is spent in the imaging phase, copying the files over etc).
It was doing this image that I realised, they only come with a 10/100 Network card (a real bummer since we upgraded our school switches to gigabit last year). These laptops were destined for wireless anyway, so it’s not too much of an issue 😉
The build quality of the laptops is good, with one horrible fatal flaw. The mouse buttons are TERRIBLE. 1/3 of the clicks on the button just don’t make it to the computer. So you sit there hitting the button hard every time and that’s probably breaking it and making it even worse later down the track.
To fix this, we bought 30 mouses to go with them.
The “upgrade” from the HP530 to the HP550 would have been just perfect if they had kept the same buttons from the HP530.
I just hope that HP realise that the buttons are terrible and do something about it for the next model. I know I’m reccommending that we don’t buy any more HP550 laptops until they come out with a newer model.
As for some of the other parts, the Battery life is great. We stack them all up at the end of the day and plug them into the charger, they sit on the kids desks throughout the day. I haven’t heard of any issues of them running out of battery at all.
Speed wise they’re pretty snappy too, we got all ours with added memory, they’re all on 2gb of RAM.
Overall, they’re a very nice, well built laptop with the sole exception of the mouse button being terrible. If you’re looking at buying some for yourself/your school, make sure you get external mouses with them.
Ducky.
