Ultimate Vista Laptop/Ultimate WPF Laptop

Hi!

Only 6 months between blog posts! Sorry, I've been pretty maxxed.

I've been hunting around for the utlimate laptop to run WPF applications on Vista. We have produced some pretty heavy WPF demos in the UK that make a lot of use of WPF 3D, for example the British Library application being used in the Vista launch. These are fine on your average desktop machine, but almost every laptop I've tried falls short. Most laptops have an on board graphics chip and the Vista drivers for laptops seem to be a bit buggy especially when playing video morphed onto 3D surfaces.

So about a year ago I started the hunt for a laptop with a good graphics card that was sufficiently mainstream that the Vista drivers would handle all the advanced WPFness we throw at them. Well I think the search is over. The HP nc8430 is the only laptop I've seen from a mainstream vendor to sport the ATI X1600 graphics card. The Vista drivers for this are rock solid and reports are that this is the ultimate laptop for developing WPF applications.

https://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF25a/21675-283229-283229-283229-12434682-12397664.html

Cheers,
Paul

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  That's incorrect. The Acer Ferrari 5000 sports the ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 as well.

• Anonymous
  January 27, 2007
  Yes I know, but in a corporate environment Acer is not so mainstream. I've since been told that the Apple MacBook has this card also, and also supports 2560x1600 external res which would be nice. Cheers, Paul