Table of Contents

1. Table of Contents
2. Introduction
3. Order
4. Shipping
5. Review
   1. Day 1
   2. Day 2
   3. Day 3
   4. Day 4
   5. Day 5
6. Updates
   1. Wireless Update
   2. ACPI Update
   3. Video Output Update
   4. FC5 Upgrade
   5. SD Card Functionality
   6. FC5 Dual-Head Working
7. FAQ - Frequently Ask Questions
8. Files
9. References

Introduction

This is a new section that I think was necessary to explain the purpose of this review/article.
My goal in getting a laptop was #1 to have something with long battery life. Other important considerations was wide-screen (15.4"), and decent speed. I knew I didn't need a 3 GHz Mobile P4 (or, P4-M as they're called). There was a lot of research that went into figuring out current marketing terms and CPU classifications as there were no less than three Intel CPUs being used in laptops at the time, with different buzzwords: P4 (desktop version), P4-M (mobile), and the Pentium-M (Banias core, later Dothan core; both can be available with the Centrino package). I eventually wittled it down to the HP/Compaq offerings (HP ZT3000 and Compaq X1000) and eventuall to the ZT3000 as I thought it looked more "businessy" and had some better components to choose from. I picked out fairly top-of-the-line options for it as I wanted it to last for awhile ($2000!!!), so I optioned for 512M of RAM (which I would upgrade to more as prices came down), a 5400 RPM drive, a higher-resolution LCD, and an extended 3 year warranty as I didn't want this thing crapping out on me.
So, those are some of my thoughts as to why I bought this particular model. Read on for more information about the ordering and shipping process, my initial review of the laptop, and further updates and questions from users.
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Order

Ordered on 2003.12.29
Used Coupon: SV5032 - 10% off until 2003.12.31

• 3-year express repair warranty upgrade for HP Pavilion and select Compaq Presario notebooks
• ac adapter for Presario x1000 & Pavilion zt3000 series notebooks
• CTO Pavilion zt3000 series notebook
  • Pentium(R) M 1.5GHz
  • Microsoft(R)Windows(R) XP Home
  • 512MB DDR SDRAM(2x256MB)
  • 60 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
  • Microsoft(R) Works/Money
  • DVD+RW / R & CD-RW Combo Drive
  • 54G wireless LAN and Bluetooth Combo
  • 15.4" WVA WSXGA+ (1680x1050)
  • 64MB Mobility Radeon(TM) 9200
  • Extra pavilion Li-Ion Battery
  • hpshopping in-box envelope

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Shipping

2003.12.29 The Warranty and the AC Adapter Shipped; expected delivery: 2003.12.31; actual delivery: 2003.12.31
  This box just contained a small shrink-wrapped cardboard paper thingy that contained the warranty, and another smaller cardboard box with the AC Adapter.
2004.01.05 The laptop and everything else; delivered on 2004.01.06
  I looked online to check the status and saw that it was delivered when I got home in the evening. It was delivered around 10:40 in the morning, but I didn't see it when I checked around lunchtime at all, even though it had already shipped (and was delivered). Then, I didn't see it when I got home; but opened the back door to the deck and found it there
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Review

First Day (2003.01.06)

Booting the laptop for the first time, everything seemed to work great. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the battery was fully charged. A startup dialog guided me through registering my product with both HP and MicroSoft. There was quite a bit of software installed, but I didn't really care about this since I wanted to dual boot. So instead of really enjoying my brand new laptop, I stuck a Fedora Core 1 CD in and set my partitions up as follows:

hda1  100M  ext3 (/boot)
hda2  15G   NTFS (C:)
hda3  15G   ext3 (/)
hda4  30G   extended
hda5  512M  Linux Swap
hda6  30G   vfat (D:, /mnt/shared)

After the partitions were setup, I rebooted to install WinXP with a Windows XP Home OEM CD. Windows installation went pretty normal; I think the XP Product Key (which is also on the bottom of the laptop) is embedded in BIOS, because I never had to activate it after the installation.
Once XP was installed, I put the Fedora Core 1 CD back in and did an HTTP installation from my home file server. It booted into the graphical installation; the only problem I encountered was that it couldn't detect my LCD screen. I just selected the generic 800x600 LCD and everything proceeded.
After it booted into Linux, of course I was running in 800x600 (which looked really bad stretched). To fix this, I needed to edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config In the "Display" SubSection of the "Screen" section, I changed the Modes line to be:

Modes    "1680x1050" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

By this time, it was about midnight and I figured I should go to bed. I was just happy to have everything running nicely. TOC

Second Day (2003.01.07)

It's Wednesday, so it's time to watch Enterprise.
I thought it would be good to get wireless working in Linux. At this time, Broadcom doesn't have any drivers for Linux. Luckily, there are a couple projects out there to try to wrap the Windows XP drivers to try to get the wireless to work, like ndiswrapper.
For the Broadcom 54g (802.11g) drivers, I used a zip file that contained the following files:

bcmwl5.inf
bcmwl5.sys

You put these into /lib/windrivers. You compile ndiswrapper as a module, install loadndisdriver, and should be able to just go:

modprobe ndiswrapper
/usr/sbin/loadndisdriver 14e4 4320 /lib/windrivers/bcmwl5.sys /lib/windrivers/bcmwl5.inf

Everything seemed to load fine, but I can't get wireless to work. In managed mode, I can't seem to set the essid. In ad-hoc mode, I can set the essid, but I can't do anything.
Enterprise ended, and still no wireless. TOC

Third Day (2003.01.08)

At this point, I figured I'd just go for it. I copied over my home directory for my IBM Thinkpad T20 and some other scripts from /usr/local/bin, and took my new laptop
I wanted to get Speedstep and Sleep mode working in Linux. After almost no luck with the stock 2.4.22 kernel FC1 ships with, I did some reading and found out that 2.6 was supposed to be much better. After a bit more reading, I was able to find that FC1 is 2.6 ready, meaning it has the new module loading stuff to run 2.6, modified init scripts, etc. Grab a 2.6 kernel from Fedora's development branch, and run rpm -ivh (remember, always install kernels). Add the following line to your /etc/fstab:

none                    /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0

At this point, it's safe to reboot. Kudzu will want you to change stuff for your Realtek network card; select either 'do nothing' or 'ignore', otherwise it will remove your eth0 config from modules.conf (2.6 uses modprobe.conf), and configure it as eth1 for 2.6.
The 2.6 kernel uses Alsa drivers, so grab alsa-utils, alsa-lib, and alsa-driver from freshrpms.net, and add the following to your /etc/modprobe.conf:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116* snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14* soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

install snd-card-0 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-card-0 && { /usr/sbin/alsactl restore >/dev/null 2>&1 || :; }
remove snd-card-0 { /usr/sbin/alsactl store >/dev/null 2>&1 || :; }; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove

install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install sound-slot-0 && { /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :; }
remove sound-slot-0 { /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >>/dev/null 2>&1 || :; }; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove

Alsa mutes everything by default, so run aumix and increase your default settings and Save your defaults.
For Speedstep stuff, Linux doesn't do any detection to try to load the correct thing, so you have to do it yourself. I was able to find that if you make a /etc/rc.modules file and make it executable, it will be run during boot. touch /etc/rc.modules; chmod +x /etc/rc.modules; then put the following in it:

#!/bin/sh
#

modprobe speedstep-centrino

Now you'll have a running Speedstep setup, but stuff won't really change until you either setup a userspace program or change your default setting from performace to powersave.

There's a lot of buttons on the laptop that don't do anything without some changes to your config. Buttons like the volume up/down/mute, the play, stop, forward, reverse buttons, etc. To get these working, we need to make X aware of the keyboard scancodes. Put the following into a ~/.xmodmaprc file:

keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
keycode 162 = XF86AudioPlay
keycode 164 = XF86AudioStop
keycode 144 = XF86AudioPrev
keycode 153 = XF86AudioNext
keycode 178 = XF86WWW
keycode 223 = XF86Standby

Then this file needs loaded when you start your window manager. I use KDE, so I did the following:
I created a .kde/Autostart/Mod-keys file and made it executable by running chmod +x .kde/Autostart/Mod-keys. Then I put the following in it:

#!/bin/bash
xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc
khotkeys

This allows you to use these buttons to assign them to do things, but they don't do anything just by adding this file. To do volume up/down/mute, I opened kmix and right-clicked on the main volume; this brings up a shortcut mapping to add these buttons and get them working

Once booting into the 2.6 Kernel, I lost the ability to use the scroll wheel section of my touchpad, and it seemed to act more erratic. I found that by loading the synaptics driver in XFree86, this would fix this. I had to add the following to my rc.modules file:

modprobe evdev

Then I installed the synaptics driver into /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/. I then modified my XF86Config file. In the Module Section, I added the following just before the 'EndSection':

	    Load  "synaptics"

Then I modified the InputDevice section that had 'Mouse0" in it to look like the following:

Section "InputDevice"
	    Identifier  "Mouse0"
	    Driver      "synaptics"
	    Option      "Protocol"      "auto-dev"
	    Option      "Device"        "/dev/psaux"
	    Option      "ZAxisMapping"  "4 5"
	    Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
	    Option      "LeftEdge"      "1900"
	    Option      "RightEdge"     "5400"
	    Option      "TopEdge"       "1900"
	    Option      "BottomEdge"    "4000"
	    Option      "FingerLow"     "25"
	    Option      "FingerHigh"    "30"
	    Option      "MaxTapTime"    "180"
	    Option      "MaxTapMove"    "220"
	    Option      "VertScrollDelta" "100"
	    Option      "MinSpeed"      "0.02"
	    Option      "MaxSpeed"      "0.18"
	    Option      "AccelFactor" "0.0010"
#       Option      "SHMConfig"     "on"
EndSection

Restart X11, and your scroll wheel is back, and the driver seems to be much more erratic

This laptop doesn't support APM mode at all, so you're stuck with ACPI. APM worked great for suspending my IBM T20, so I was expecting great things for ACPI. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of effort has been put into the scripts that control sleeping, shutdown, etc. Looking at the proc interface, it looks like sleeping should work:

[silfreed@joshua silfreed]$ cat /proc/acpi/sleep
S0 S3 S4 S4bios S5

However, echo 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep seems to put the box to sleep, but doesn't shutoff the screen, and I can't wake the box up. No good at all. Pressing the power button shuts down a little too hard, as it just runs shutdown -h now

Still, the new laptop is working quite well, as I've been keeping my notes for my review, and now am writing it on the laptop, and the T20's sitting at home. TOC

Fourth Day (2003.01.09)

Just used it as a laptop. VG.
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Fifth Day (2003.01.10)

I realized I needed a USB to DB9 serial adapter and didn't have one. Drat.
I finally figured out how to do use cpudyn / lamp by modprobing the correct modules to enable the userspace & powersave modes in cpufreq for Red Hat 2.6 Kernels. My rc.modules file now looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
#

modprobe speedstep-centrino
modprobe cpufreq_userspace
modprobe cpufreq_powersave
modprobe evdev

I'm currently using cpudyn to speed up/slow down my box depending on load, but I'm thinking Lamp would do a better job, since it adjust the CPU in 200MHz increments depending on whether load is above or below 50%.
The 2.6.1 kernel was released yesterday, and Red Hat released a new development kernel for Fedora, but I haven't tried it out yet.
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Updates

Wireless Update (2003.01.25)

I got wireless working!
After no luck getting the BroadCom 54g 802.11g chipset to work with ndiswrapper, I finally got the thing working with new drivers made available from HP. The drivers I used were:

# ls -al /lib/windrivers/
-rwxr--r--    1 root     root      1161320 Jan 25 13:36 bcmwl5.inf
-rwxr--r--    1 root     root       286848 Jan 25 13:36 bcmwl5.sys

These drivers just worked; `iwlist wlan0 scan` showed me my wap, and I was able to give myself an IP just fine (I haven't setup the automatic stuff yet). The tarball that includes the driver I used can be found below.
In other news, I didn't realize I didn't have usb working in 2.6 until I tried to setup my bluetooth. I've modified my modprobe.conf file to load the usb stuff, and my bluetooth is now detected fine. I haven't done much with it yet, but I plan on doing Bluetooth syncing with my Palm.
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ACPI Suspend (2005.05.23)

Recently Suspend-to-RAM has become a possibility with the release of the 2.6.11 kernel. There is a thread showing ACPI Suspend working on HP nx7010. I haven't totally gotten this working yet, but I do have a Suspend Script written that manages to put my laptop asleep in "init 3". Here's a couple other resources I found dealing with ACPI:

• FC3 on HP nx7010
• ACPI Info on FC2/3

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Video Output (2006.03.17)

A couple months ago I took a new job and my laptop became my primary computer. The biggest thing I wanted to do was run a second monitor. I had a couple choices: use xinerama, ATI's proprietary fglrx driver, or merged frame buffer. I chose xinerama since it's the most compatible.
The video card in this laptop is getting fairly old (ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 w/ 64M RAM) so I was very worried that it wouldn't have enough RAM to run a 1680x1050 native LCD and a 1600x1200 CRT - but it does! The problem is that it can't hardware accelerate anything over 2000x2000, so I chose to have a separate xorg config file for when I don't have an external monitor and one for when I do. I use my arpdetect program to symlink the proper xorg.conf file in place depending on my location.
I had problems using the HP dock - the monitor wouldn't be recognized when the MonitorLayout was left set to 'AUTO' for the second monitor. I had to force the monitor type to get it to work, but after that everything was fine. Also - the DVI on the HP/Compaq docks doesn't work for external monitors with this laptop - go fig.
The config files I was using at this date are below.
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FC5 Update (2006.03.29)

As I blog states, my upgrade to FC5 went mostly uneventful except the fact that it broke my Dual Head/Xinerama setup at work. I can't find anything useful in the Xorg log file, so I'm pretty much stuck until someone else gets it fixed. I scour Fedora Forums daily in hope of a solution since it seems that I'm not the only one, but there's not much hope so far. Once I have working xorg.conf files for FC5 I'll be sure to post them again.
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SD Card Functionality (2006.04.05)

The SD card reader works! Once I setup a wbsd.modules file in /etc/sysconfig/modules (wget -O /etc/sysconfig/modules/wbsd.modules $file && chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/modules/wbsd.modules) I'm able to mount, read, and write to my SD card. In FC5 and KDE the device just pops up when I insert an SD card without me configuring fstab at all, so I'm not sure how to do this manually mount this if necessary, but I don't really need to!
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FC5 Dual-Head Working (2006.04.22)

This is actually about a week and a half old, but I was finally able to get dual-head support working in FC5. Turns out Xorg 7.0 is a little bit finickier than 6.9 was about scancodes, so I have new xorg.conf files up with the proper settings. I'm using MergedFB now as well, which should hopefully be better for hardware-accelerated 3d. The screensavers I've seen definitely look like they're running faster, but they only seem to display on about 2/5 of the screen. Oh well - at least I have two displays again.
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FAQ

How solid is the construction?

You have to realize that this is a big laptop. It's a full 2 inches wider than my T21 was. With that in mind, it is very well constructed for it's size and thickness (thinness?). I have had it for a year now, putting it in my backpack daily, using at work and home as my primary computer with no problems yet at all. But it does only come with a one year warranty; makes me wonder what might happen in the near future, and I'm also happy I bought the 3 year warranty.

How does it wear (paint, scratches, etc)?

So far it seems fairly durable. On the ZT3000, a lot more of the laptop is black as opposed to the X1000, but there is still the silver painted plastic around the keyboard, touchpad, screen, and the entire lid. So far the only areas that are wearing are the right side plastic beside the screen and beside the keyboard, but this is because that's the end that goes into the bottom of my backpack so it would get 'squished together' more often than the rest. Other than that, no scratches on the screen, and the touchpad is still fully functional.

How well does it multitask/How is the performance?

I bought this laptop knowing quite well that it wasn't a 3GHz P4; I wanted something that had 4 hour battery life. With that in mind, this laptop works better than a P3 1.5GHz would work. I run Linux almost exclusively, and I commonly have one or two web browsers, email client, jabber client, several console windows, RSS reader, and some other eye-candy. When I need to, I'll open up the Gimp or OpenOffice Writer/Calc without closing down my other apps. I never feel like I'm waiting for anything. I play DVDs or Anime (300M/0.5hr) without any hiccups.

How long do you think the laptop will last/When will you need to upgrade?

Me, I thought 1.5GHz would be fine for me for several years. I imagine the video card will be holding me back long before the CPU is. And I can still upgrade to 2GB of RAM in the meantime (I only have 512M right now). Basically, I plan to get my warranty's worth out of it (3 years). I expect by then I'll want something a little lighter, maybe thinner.

How is the keyboard/touchpad?

I like the keyboard very much; it has great responsiveness and travel on all the keys, and all the (important) keys are full-sized and where they should be. The touchpad is terrific; as it's made by synaptics, you can actually do more than just have a vertical scroll area that is silk-screened onto the touchpad. I've configured mine to have a very thin horizontal scroll area along the bottom, as well. Plus it has all kinds of other neat features like 'palm detection', 'two-finger detection' (double taps, middle clicks), double click detection, and a very useful 'touchpad off' button when you're typing long documents. So far the only noticable wear is on my space bar and enter key where they have a slight 'gloss' to them.

Is the hard drive speed noticable?

I bought a 5400 RPM drive for my laptop because I knew it would make a difference (and the 7200 RPM drives were insanely expensive when I bought my laptop; they're not much better now). I don't really notice any hesitation with the kind of work I do, but if you were into editing videos, I would definitely get a 7200 RPM drive; otherwise, the 5400 RPM drive I got should be great for most applications and is almost completely quiet.

How's the battery life?

Battery life is superb; which is good because that's the reason I bought it. I can still get 3.5 hours out of it on wireless, or closer to 4.25 on battery. Considering sleep doesn't work in Linux on this laptop and I usually just let it on with the screen closed in my backpack on the way to/from work, it does a great job.

How's the gameplay?

I couldn't tell you, really. It's an ATI Radeon 9000 in reality and does fairly well. I don't have any benchmarks for any recent games (or any games at all, actually).

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Files

• Photos
• Xorg.conf (dualhead)
• Xorg.conf (singlehead)
• modprobe.conf
• wbsd.modules
• BroadCom 54g Drivers

Depricated Files

• rc.modules
• rc.local
• modprobe.conf
• XF86Config
• .xmodmaprc
• Mod-keys
• Suspend Script

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