List Price: $ 849.99
Price: $ 679.99
Umbrella Feature
- Intel Core i5-480M Processor 2.66GHz with Turbo Boost Technology up to 2.93GHz
- 4GB DDR3 System Memory (2 DIMM) Max supported = 8GB
- 750GB (5400RPM) Hard Drive (SATA) with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
- Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
- Intel HD Graphics with up to 1696MB total graphics memory
Umbrella Description
Enjoy life without limits and get entertainment that moves you. Access the music and movies you love using the HP Pavilion dv6-3250us Entertainment Notebook PC. Watch DVDs on the 15.6-inch diagonal High-Definition LED display, plus stream content wirelessly from the display to an HDTV using a WiDi adapter (sold separately). The keyboard on this HP laptop is backlit, so you can control movie playback and type easily in the dark. Video chat in low-light environments using the integrated HP webcam and log in to secure websites effortlessly using the integrated fingerprint reader. The sleek HP Pavilion dv6-3250us Entertainment Notebook PC has the perfect balance of style and substance. It’s finished in brushed aluminum with the stream design in argento. Burn custom labels onto CDs and DVDs using LightScribe Technology and transfer photos from a memory card directly to your HP laptop. Expect great performance with a powerful Intel processor and get amazing sound with Dolby Advanced Audio. Browse the Web from any room using built-in Wi-Fi, plus enjoy online gaming with Intel HD video graphics.
List Price: $ 21.99
Price: $ 8.80
Umbrella Feature
Umbrella Description
From its beginning in the foothills of the towering Himalayas, M.M. Kaye’s masterwork is a vast, rich and vibrant tapestry of love and war that ranks with the greatest panoramic sagas of modern fiction.
The Far Pavilions is itself a Himalayan achievement, a book we hate to see come to an end. it is a passionate, triumphant story that excites us, fills us with joy, move us to tears, satisfies us deeply, and helps us remember just what it is we want most from a novel.
Find More Pavilion Products
May 24th, 2011 on 6:22 pm
GREAT DEAL!,
An awesome laptop. Very good looking design (argento on brushed aluminum). Feels sturdy in hand. All the bells and whistles as per the specifications including a backlit keyboard (which was really the selling point for me). Only problem and I mean the ONLY problem for me is the click/touch pad… to click on an item and/or drag and drop is kind of cumbersome to execute…the click part of the pad feels a bit stiff or too far down from tyhe location I’m used to it being in on other laptops…but I figure I’ll get used to it after a while. What I think would have been great to just make this the ideal compact and economical merge of hardware vs. price would be integrated bluetooth. But no sweat for me I already had an IOgear bluetooth dongle to connect….Again, awesome laptop!
Was this review helpful to you?Â
|May 24th, 2011 on 6:41 pm
Best Laptop Under $800,
I spent a good two weeks comparing laptops in the $600-$800 range, and this one gets you the most bang for your buck — by far. Huge hard drive, speedy processor, and enough RAM to run Pro Tools 9 (in other words, plenty of RAM). The back-lit keyboard and fingerprint reader are a nice touch, as is the wide screen. Speakers are surprisingly good for a laptop, too. My only qualm is that it comes loaded with useless software — a whole punch of programs and games made by HP and Microsoft that you really don’t need. It only took about a half-hour to clear those out, though, and from then on it’s been smooth sailing. Also, it doesn’t come with a full Microsoft Office Suite, just the starter, which is Word and Excel with these annoying ads. But Word and Excel are clunky and weak compared to Open Office, which you can download and install lickety-split at [...]. Did I mention Open Office is free, too? Goodness I love freeware.
In short: I am a very picky purchaser. I checked every store and website I could find, and if $800 is your limit, BUY THIS LAPTOP. The fingerprint reader will totally amaze your friends.
Was this review helpful to you?Â
|May 24th, 2011 on 7:26 pm
Great Deal,
This laptop is great. The processor is super-fast, backlit keyboard is amazing, and I love the fingerprint scanner. The graphics look great and once you tweak the sound a little, the sound isn’t too bad. I would absolutely recommend this to anyone and I can’t say enough about the backlit keyboard. It’s kind of like getting your first DVR, you didn’t see why everyone was making such a big deal about them, but once you get one you can’t imagine going without it again.
Was this review helpful to you?Â
|May 24th, 2011 on 8:06 pm
The best epic novel ever,
 Â
 Â
This book is at once a sweeping romance, a gripping adventure story, and a tale about identity and belonging. I just love it, and re-read it regularly. M M Kaye is simply the most marvellous story teller, and her descriptions of India are breath-taking too.
It is the story of Ashton/Ashok – an English boy brought up by a peripatetic father in the foothills of the Himalayas – he is about 6 years old when cholera strikes the camp and kills everyone but himself and his nurse. She takes him down into India to give him back to the safety of the English – but this is 1857 and India is in mutiny against the English. Ash, having been brought up amongst Indians can speak their languages fluently, and he is the right colouring to pass as one of the races from the North where they are paler. So his nurse escapes from the troubles with him and brings him up as her own son. This sets the stage for many of his later problems, the key one being that of his identity – for when he must later seek safety with the English and his true birth is revealed he finds it difficult to know who he truly is for he is at once Indian and English. While a boy Ash meets Anjuli, a princess in the court where he is working. She is the daughter of an Indian/Russian mother – and because of her birth, and her mother’s death in the court, she is also never really properly accepted.
MM Kaye sets this story against the grand displays of Indian courts, the British army (which Ashton later joins to return to India), teeming bazaars, and the different cultures and religions of India.
Its an enormous book to get through but it is well worth pretty much every page. I’ve never been one for long descriptions of war, and the scenes of the siege in Afghanistan towards the end I always find a bit of a trial. That is really such a small piece of the whole novel for most of it Ash and later Anjuli too, try to work out who they are and how they fit into India, or perhaps England. Their relationships and identities are tested against their friends who enter their lives and for various reasons leave them again. It is at once incredibly tragic and wonderfully romantic. I fell in love with India the first time I read this book and subsequent readings haven’t changed my opinion.
MM Kaye wrote two other real epics. Shadow of the Moon which I also really love, although it is a bit more romantic than this one – and Trade Winds which is set in Zanzibar as I remember – but the heroine in that just doesn’t gel for me. The Far Pavillions is simply the best epic novel ever written (I think)
Was this review helpful to you?Â
|May 24th, 2011 on 8:19 pm
A Sweeping Tapestry,
_The Far Pavilions_ is a sweeping tapestry of a novel encompassing numerous characters and situations set against the cultural clash of British India. The clash of cultures is embodied in the main character, Ashton Pelham-Martyn. Born in India and raised by a Hindu woman after the death of his parents, he later learns that he is actually English. He’s sent to his father’s family in England to be brought up “properly” and returns to India as an officer in the military, but soon discovers that his early experiences have made it impossible for him to be truly English, just as his English training has made it impossible for him to be truly anything else. Along the way he meets and falls in love with the half-caste Hindu princess, Anjuli, another whose mixed birth causes her much tribulation and pain in a land rife with bigotry from all sides and built on traditions that make it all but impossible for people of different cultures to meet and accept one another in purely human terms.
M. M Kaye does a magnificent job depicting the various cultures and systems of thought prevalent in India and the surrounding areas at the time. For the most part she does so without giving any value judgement, but she is not timid about pointing out that every culture has its fanatics and that these can cause many problems for the bulk of the population who just want to live their lives in peace. She also excellently conveys the inherent sadness of a situation where caste laws and religious differences come between people who otherwise love one another. By placing her protagonist squarely between two dominant cultures, she illustrates the loneliness of a person who cannot see things in terms of black or white, or adhere to an ill-advised policy merely because it is advanced by people of the same race and beliefs.
_The Far Pavilions_ is really two books in one. First it is the story of Ash and Juli; second it is the story of British military policy in India and Afghanistan, culminating in the Second Afghan War and the disastrous attempt to establish a British Mission in Kabul. Where the book fell flat for me was in the last two or three hundred pages, where the second story took so much precedence over the first that it seemed to belong in another novel all together and the main characters were virtually lost in the uproar. While the events in Afghanistan were necessary to Ash’s making his ultimate decision about how he wanted to live his life and thus had to be presented in some detail, I still experienced the whole section as something of a let down. For me, it was not as gripping as earlier parts of the book, despite the events. I also found the ending itself a little disappointing; I would have liked it to have gone farther, as it seemed to me that Ash and Juli’s story was just left dangling.
This is not a “Happy-Ever-After” kind of story, so if that’s what you’re looking for you might be disappointed. It is, however, a marvelous depiction of a fascinating piece of history. If you like historical novels, you can’t do much better.
Was this review helpful to you?Â
|May 24th, 2011 on 8:49 pm
A boy with no home , a princess, evil stepmothers, war, forbidden love and exploration of Indian culture, this book has it all,
 Â
 Â
This is a book that I have been recommended countless times and always declined reading. I can no longer really remember why, except that the first page always seemed a stiff and confusing. But this year, upon seeing the number of pages the book was (1200 pages in mass market paperback) and being recommended it one more time I decided to give it a shot.
All I can say is wow! This is one of those historical epics that ranks right up there with Gone With the Wind in terms of scope, romance, and underlying issues. It’s just an amazing novel.
This is the story of Ashton, who is raised from birth by a Hindu foster mother while his father treks around Indian on linguistic missions. When his father dies and the sephoy mutiny happens, his foster mother Sita (a women with real courage) discuses the already dark skinned Ash as her own son and takes him to a remote state where the violence against the British has yet to spread. Here he becomes the servant/playmate of the heir to the throne and the boy’s half-sister, Juli. But the heir is in danger from his wicked stepmother who wants him dead so her own son will be heir and when Ash prevents this one to many times he and Sita must flee for their lives. It is then that Sita revels Ash is really British and sends him off to find his own “people.”
Of course later Ash will find Juli again-when he is assigned to escort her and thousands of others to her wedding in a far away state. You can guess what kind of turmoil this turns up.
While a great deal of this book is a romance, an adventure, a war story and a exploration of a culture, it is also about the search for identity for poor Ash, who is really neither British no Indian but “two men in one skin-which is an uncomfortable thing to be.”
There’s also fantastic (and quite sensitive towards Indian considering it was written by a Brit) descriptions of the imperialism of the British and the stupidly of them in some situations (like the Afghan wars.) and a truly touching sentiment about finding a place in the world free or prejudice or danger where you can just be whatever you turn out to be.
Anyway, this is an amazing book. The absolute only thing I didn’t love was the ending, which seemed a little out of place with the main plot, but the last few pages tied it back in and then it was just perfect.
Five stars. I should have read this long ago, and look forward to reading others by the author.
Was this review helpful to you?Â
|