HP would not be my first choice; the hardware is ok, but they have been
less user friendly over time than some other vendors (they are not the
worst, but there are better). Personally I'd prefer Lenovo, Dell and
Toshiba to HP. I was also very favorably impressed by a Gateway that I
bought this past summer.

Don't know if the bios will boot from a USB flash drive or not. These
days, it probably will (most now do), but it's still a model-by-model
issue to some degree.

Pretty much all of today's drives that have DVD burners will burn pretty
much everything. This is more a function of the drive than of the
laptop, and most laptop makers use different drives (from different
manufacturers) in different production runs of the same laptop model.
But the standard today is to use drives that burn pretty much all
formats of everything (at least of CD and DVD ... R and RW, + and -,
single and dual layer). The only thing you won't always find is support
for "Lightscribe" (by that or another name with a different trademark).

Windows updates (Windows itself, e.g. literally "Windows Update") is
generic from Microsoft. But if you need support (e.g. telephone
support), that still comes from the OEM (laptop vendor), and all driver
support and updates also comes from the hardware vendor.


R. P. wrote:
> I am considering buying my first laptop but I am a bit bewildered by all
> the brands and choices out there. By now I was able to narrow it down
> to a 14" or 15" HP Pavilion brand, probably with AMD Turion 64 X2 dual
> core CPU, in the $900 to $1,100 range with 2 GB memory. A few of the
> spec details, however, that I am interested in, are not spelled out on
> HP's Web site, so I wonder if some of you HP notebook owners with
> current models could fill the gap for me.
>
> Do these notebooks have a BIOS that allows booting from a USB thumb drive?
>
> Does the User Manual list all the CD formats the optical drive can read
> and write? The specs usually just mention the DVD options. I am
> specifically interested in models that can read and write CD+G (Karaoke)
> format. I assume that if one particular HP model can do that format than
> probably others might as well, as the probably use the same drives in
> most of their laptops.
>
> Lastly, who provides Windows updates, HP or Microsoft? It used to be
> that one needed to get OS updates from the vendor on pre-loaded systems.
> That, unfortunately, also meant being left behind from the most current
> MS updates.
>
> Thanks for any help you can give me on these issues.
>
> Rudy