General Impressions:
This is a great notebook. The screen output is absolutely incredible. There is no way I could take a picture of it that would do it justice. It is a big and beatuiful screen. The level of performance of the notebook in 3D Mark 2001 was to be expected. This notebook is running and Intel integrated graphics chipset. I think we are all aware of the lack luster performance of such chipsets.
Windows XP: Curses on HP anyways, Windows XP is a POS. If you don't know what that means, then stop reading this. Anyways, Windows XP might not crash, but all sorts of applications running on it do. I mean, I could care less if the whole OS is stable if I keep on losing the work as I am typing because the app dies. There is no difference. I have been running Windows 2000 for nearly 3 years now, and I will say that it has been a lot better for a long time. If you are of the notion and you have the proper licenses, you can install Windows 2000. All you need to do is to go and download about 25 megs of Omnibook XE3 drivers for Windows 2000 and burn them up before you start. Windows 2000 runs very well on the notebook and does not crash nearly as much. You lose no functionality, just some sleep with the lengthy install time. Also, you lose all the nice bundled software such as Musicmatch Jukebox, Microsoft Works, MS Money, Quicken, and other things. But, if you already have this apps somehow and are willing to spend the time, then I would suggest getting rid of Windows XP at least until Service Pack 2 or the good word of friends running it.
Word Processing: Well, this hardly taxes the resources of this notebook in any way... If all you do is word process, save yourself some money and look elsewhere. On a positive note though, if you are one of those types, like me, who is constantly on AIM or ICQ, then the big display present will easily allow you to see a whole page of text without squinting and have your winamp and AIM windows off to the side, for ready access to waste time listening to music and chatting with friends.
Gaming: I have played Need for Speed 5: Porsche Unleashed, MS Flight Simlator 2000, and Rogue Spear: Urban Operations on this notebook. Display resolution was set at 1024x768, which scales nicely on the screen. The performance of these games was certainly acceptable. I would not want to have this notebook as my main gaming machine for playing Quake III, but if you are an occassional gamer, you should not have any issues. If you want some serious gaming performance, I suggest you go for a notebook with a GeForce 2 Go or ATI Radeon Mobility chipset running its graphics.
Mathematical Applications: Being that I am a computer engineer, math is a large part of my life. I have run Matlab, Maple V R11, and Mathematica 4.0 on this notebook. All of the applications ran very well. 3-D graphing was also very good, including the rotation of large 3-D graphs in programs such as Maple. If you are the type of person who runs many scientific applications, you will be very pleased.
Compiling: In the past month, I have had the opportunity to develop many projects under Metrowerks Code Warrior in C++. Having the large display is an absolute godsend when you are working on a large project with many header files and other dependencies occurring. Compile times are very rapid, though, occasionally they do show the lacking drive speed of the program. In fact, most every program shows the lacking drive speed compared to my desktop which is running a 10k RPM Cheetah hard drive.
Ripping CDs to MP3 and MP3-> CD Burning: I was very pleased with the audio rip speed of this notebook. Again, nothing can compete with a Kenwood Zen drive, but, in the world of a notebook, this thing smokes. I had recently purchased the new Michael Jackson album, Invincible, and was interested in ripping it to MP3 so I could put it on my Intel Pocket Concert. Well, I would say that I ripped the whole CD in about 5 minutes, which isn't bad for a CD that is 77 minutes long. Burning CDs is a piece of cake. HP included some crappy software, so, I installed Nero Burning ROM, which is much more familiar to me. Needless to say, 8x burn speeds were no problem for going directly from MP3 to CD audio for this computer.