Did Microsoft pay HP to change their DVD player?
August 27, 2006I’ve got an HP laptop that I absolutley love. It’s been perfect–reasonable weight, DVD burner, bright screen, plenty of disk space, and it was very affordable. As a bonus, it came with this built-in DVD player that you could fire up without having to start Windows. Some kind of embedded OS that ran the DVD player.
Now normally I would not be shopping for a new PC quite yet. The HP is only 2 years old, and I tend to wait at least three years before the itch starts and I start looking around. But my Mom really needs a laptop, especially for her plan to fly back to the Philippines and help work at a school for needy children. So I’m thinking about giving her the HP and using that as an excuse to upgrade a bit early.
Since I liked this HP I was looking at replacing it with another HP. I was at Circuit City earlier today and I noticed that while the current model also has a built-in DVD player, it’s powered by an embedded version of Windows XP. It looks like they’ve basically used XP’s ability to save its current state to disk, and have created what amounts to an image of the DVD software. So when you click the DVD player button you briefly see the XP boot screen as it retrieves the image into memory.
Microsoft has in essence replaced the one non-MS piece of code that used to run on these HP’s. I wonder how much they paid or arm-twisted HP to make the change? I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad–the new player looks to be more competent than the one that’s burned into the laptop I have. Still it’s kinda creepy if you ask me.
HP is still my first choice, I mean they’re the only laptop that actually has a quick-boot DVD player built in. Still it gives you pause–I really would like to find out what motivated the switch.