Enjoying the summer? I know I am, and what better way to enjoy the heat than relaxing in the garden with friends, barbecuing and enjoying the odd ice cold drink or three.
For me, the perfect accompaniment is good background music and this usually presents a logistical problem, having to move my surround sound speakers outside, lifting up cables and ensuring they aren’t tripped over – in short, somewhat of a kerfuffle!
I knew the G71V had a decent speaker system so decided to give it a try before resorting to the old method of partial lounge surgery to get the speakers outside.
I had two options available to me. Firstly, my iTunes library was loaded onto the 1TB hard drive and at 60GB all-in, was looking rather sad and alone on the cavernous hard drive. One thing is for certain, it is going to take me a long time to get to a point where I’ll need to look at a hard drive upgrade.
Now if you have never used iTunes’ Visualiser, try it out – it is utterly absorbing and usually stops the conversation as people are drawn into the weird images created on the screen to accompany your iTunes music.
My second option (and favourite) was using Spotify to stream music off the web. Using the 802.11n Wi-Fi card was great in the garden and as it provides 7 times the speed of a typical 802.11g network, there were no breaks in streaming the music from the router. There is nothing worse than when someone is in mid sentence, belting out a song, and sudden silence ensues due to the song being buffered!
So with my music collection in place, I adjusted the equaliser settings, set the volume to ‘stun’ and away we went. My friends who had popped over for the barbecue were suitably impressed, both with the overall look of the G71V with its gloss piano black livery and accompanying flashy disco lights and the fact that there wasn’t the usual lacklustre, tinny “3 watts of pure distortion” sound normally associated with laptops.
While I was never in danger of having the police drop in and charge me with disturbing the peace, the G71V was nevertheless a great accompaniment to the afternoon’s festivities. “Party on, Garth!”
