Andy
Be careful with blanket statements such as your's that "HP/Compaq Sucks. Big time. Their "customer service" is god awful, and their laptops are poorly constructed pieces of junk. I used to own one. I now have a Dell, and it has so far served me well".
Folks tend to jump all over you with comments about how your one particular experience does not indicate that every HP laptop ever made is a POS, or that Dell is the cats meow.
My experience with a HP 7010 laptop mirrors yours with the Dell, terrific value, very reliable, a workhorse. I use mine in a very busy performing arts center as a desktop replacement. I wanted an IBM or Dell, but neither offered a 17"
screen, which is a very good thing to have when doing
CAD work. In fact the only 17"
unit at the time outside of a
Mac, was a Toshiba, which at the time had a poor reliabilty
rating compared to the HP. The HP has actually exceeded my expectations and a quick web search yielded this:
https://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,123409,pg,9,00.asp about laptops/notebooks in general.
One thing I've learned about computers in 10 years of having them in the home and 25 years of use at work is that such ratings are very rough and never seem to reflect actual usage. My first home computer was a Gateway, who's reputation at the time was as the most reliable with the best cucsomer support. My
unit had 9 terrible months of problem (registry errors) with countless calls (3-5 times a week) to service. I had to threaten legal action to get them to
send me a new and DIFFERENT computer, which they eventually did. After that I never purchased another Gateway. My experience with HP, on the other
hand is that I have never had to
call tech support. I was so happy with the reliability of the laptop that I purchased a desktop for the home 2 years ago, which also has run fine.
As to XP Home vs. Pro ?. It's a tough
call. XP Pro does offer better
network support and usage and is required for certain functions, such as accessing
ETC Net2 systems,
CEM Plus On-Line and remote
console in Emphasis. These may well not be something most folks need, but if the computer comes with XP Pro, take it. It may well be that you can get more features on a machine with XP Home - more USB Posts ?, a DVD burner ?, who knows, and that may have more value. But if it's apples to apples and one machine has XP Pro, then that's a better choice.
My $.02
SB