that's a great deal, Kathy. after my trouble with HP, i wouldn't get it. i'm sure others have had perfectly good relationships with customer service and the product itself though.

I've been weeding out brands after hearing various horror stories, so HP is just about the only one left that I hadn't heard anything bad about! (Sony produces horrible laptops that are constantly crapping out, Dells are being returned to the store at a rapid clip, Acers are cheap POS, etc.) What happened with you, tiggy?

short story? my first problem was the laptop "losing" the wireless card. i had to end up shipping the laptop in and they fixed it in record time. that time. the next couple of times i had to send it in because my screen was going completely black for no reason. then again it "lost" the wireless card.

total times shipped back to them for the same problems? 5. how long had i had it? less than a year. i ended up selling it to a co-worker and buying a toshiba, which i LOVE.

i ended up selling it to a co-worker

So your co-worker was driven insane before they had a chance to kill you?

ha! no. you want to hear the crazy thing? she hasn't had a bit of trouble out of it. however, she's not using it as her primary computer. i was.

We have a 37" LG 1080p TV and are pretty happy with it so far. The one knock I have against it is DVD playback with our quite old DVD player which doesn't seem that great to me. Same DVD playback via the computer that we use for essentially all of our viewing is fantastic though. Digital picture slide shows are just awesome on it.

Not sure what is up with the DVD stuff, as other composite input looks great. I suspect a shiny new up scaling DVD player would work dandy, but with the computer there's no reason to get one.

Here is a review of it:

[link]

As a note: While researching, I read about many problems with going from DVI on the computer to HDMI on the TV. So if you want to use it as a big computer monitor, I would look for one with a VGA plug just to be sure.

I'd say look into a receiver that deals with HDMI. I picked up this Sony [link] as I was upgrading the TV and other components. For the price it seemed the best deal. Does 7.1 and all the digital formats and actually has 4 HDMI inputs, which is a lot even for much higher priced machines.

Here's the thing, there are a few digital audio formats which only transmit over HDMI, not the optical or Coaxial connections, one of them is the TrueHD format which is starting to be used on more Blu-Ray discs. Also, after a fair amount of research I came to the conclusion that the best Blu-Ray player actually is a PS3. Sony keeps the firmware on that updated much better and faster than pretty much anything else on the market. It turns out that most facilities that review Blu-Ray players use the PS3 as their benchmark.

that has more i/o then I could hope to use. I don't even have my cassette tape deck hooked up anymore, or turntable, since I never use them.

But your post did have me looking at PS3's. No clue why. I don't play the games I have on Xbox enough as it is. But the hype! Ohhhh the hype has me thinking "Blu ray will be prettier"

Pete said the same thing about the PS3. I can't wait to get one.

I can't justify a Wii and a PS3. But I want 'em both and I've got neither.