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"With a $700 budget, Matt and Olivia find their perfect laptop a large screen HP dv7 with great battery life. Great for sharing pictures of their son Jayden with friends and family."

Wow, it sure does look sturdy, doesn't it?

Best Buy doesn't have any $700 DV7's on their site, so it's hard to tell if they got what they actually wanted, but the $589 model has a super-impressive battery life of 2 hours 30 minutes.

Do any of the laptop hunters actually say, "I want this" and actually get it?

"Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" ad campaign focuses on the price difference between Windows PCs and expensive Apple Macs. The commercials have raised consumers' perception of Microsoft's "value" -- and have hurt Apple -- according to YouGov BrandIndex, a research service."

Something struck me as odd, and reading the comments on the post, I found it:

"Yeah, good point, Dan, the wild swings in the graph from one extreme to the other, would tend to make this graph somewhat questionable. Honestly, does perception of value change THAT much over such a short period of time? Can we see other comparative graphs of other companies? Can they correlate it to anything?"

That is indeed an interesting question because the run of the ads doesn't seem to correlate with the "dip" in value perception. I'd be interested to see other value perception charts as well. I'm not saying the interpretation of the data is wrong, I'm just not sure if that interpretation can be made with the amount of data given.

Oh brother, they're at it again...

Okay, Microsoft is obviously getting better at being truthful because, for the second time, I don't really have any big problems with this one. I just have one question: Why did she look at the 15.4" MBP and then buy a 13" Dell? Of course the 15.4" isn't in her budget (I've even said that it's expensive), but the 13" is and that more than suits her requirements of being portable, light and powerful, and easily fits into her "budget."

Yet again, the basis for comparison just doesn't make any sense. It would be the equivalent of me going car shopping, looking at the Chevrolet Traverse (which I bought) and saying it's too expensive, then buying a Honda Civic. That comparison is too much, but if I compare the Chevrolet Aveo or Cobalt, the price is much closer and they're similar class cars.

Other than that, the ad seems fine. Not as inflammatory as the prior ones and not as chock full of crap. Maybe MS realized that while no one expects gospel truth from ads, it wouldn't be a bad idea to "honest them up" a bit.

"Here's something that should get Mac fan boys foaming at the mouth. Pictured above is the office of Alex Bogusky, the brains behind Microsoft's new Laptop Hunter commercials. Sure enough, those are two MacBook Pros sitting on his desk."

Sure this doesn't say a whole lot. I mean, I'm sure there are companies that produce ads for Honda that have employees driving around Dodges. It's just really funny that the company making one of the most hated strings of ads ever is using a product they make a point of bashing in each and every one of them.

I've always thought Microsoft was missing a huge opportunity with these stupid ads, and that's the opportunity to show that the ad itself was made on a Windows PC. If you go to any site created with Apple's iWeb, you see a "Made on a Mac" logo on the bottom of it. Microsoft should've employed a company using Windows for their ads, and made a huge deal about how the ads were made on Windows PCs. If nothing else, it would provide some fodder for the Windows folks who insist that everything done on a Mac can be done on a PC. They could've even hired Sheila! I hear she wanted a laptop that could cut video and that's what she got at Fry's...

"Sheila browses through a few more notebooks before settling on an HP HDX 16t. The specific details of the system were not disclosed, but HP offers configurations starting at $1200. The recommended system costs $1700, directly from the manufacturer, and features a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, a 320GB hard drive and 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT GPU."

At least she got a good machine that might actually be suitable for the task and her requirements (unlike Giampaolo whose choice still baffles me every time I see his commercial). The only puzzling part of the ad is her requirement that the new machine be able to "cut video." Okay, I can understand that. My question comes from her strange platform hunting. After all, how many hardcore video editors aren't already married to one particular piece of software?

For example, most of my editing is done on iMovie '09 and for bigger projects that require more oomph, I use Final Cut Express, neither of which would allow me to buy a Windows PC. Ever. Wouldn't someone as hardcore as Sheila have a similar preference? And if so, why even bother looking at other platforms?

Just struck me as odd, but like I said, at least she got a good machine.

Yep, they're at it again. Meet Lisa, a mom who thinks Apple computers are "popular at that age" (as she points to her whatever year old kid) and her son, Jackson, who wants a big hard drive, speed, and a computer that's good for gaming. What do they look at? Why, a Vista 64 laptop from Sony, of course! Doesn't everyone?

Unlike in the Giampaolo ad (surely you remember him? he's the "picky" and "technically savvy" guy who walked out of Fry's with an utter piece of slow heavy crap after saying he wanted speed and portability), these guys actually got a halfway decent machine. Of course, you'll never find that machine listed on the Laptop Hunters site; they don't put the machines there anymore, so you can't make fun as easily as you used to!

Either way, it has all the features of a typical "Laptop Hunters" ad. The stupid dig at Apple, the revelation that they need a PC, and the purchase of a PC at a big box store where your options are grossly limited to whatever they have in stock on the shelves. Should be interesting to find out, down the road, how well Jackson's gaming is going on a laptop (!?) running Windows Vista 64 (*sigh*), with a graphics chipset that's roughly 2 generations old (nice move). But hey, they have Blu Ray! On a 16.4" screen! With a remote!

Here's the machine they bought.

"On a budget of just $1500, Giampaolo looks for a high-spec laptop that's up to his standards."

Portability, power, and battery life. Got it. So what does he end up with? An HP laptop with under 2.5 hours of battery life, RAM that's running at half the speed of his CPU, and a 16" screen. But don't worry; Giampaolo is very picky and he knows what he wants. Oh, and Macs are just about aesthetics, you see. There's no portability, power, or battery life there.

In fact, in every way he was searching for, the MacBook that he dismissed as "only about aesthetics" actually fit his needs better. It has a much better battery, a screen that runs at almost the same resolution (the HP he picked up runs at 1366 x 768 which I'm sure looks marvelous blown up to 15 inches), and a CPU of equal speed with RAM that's matched to it. Oh yeah, and no OS upgrade required to run 4 gigs of RAM.

At least with the "Lauren" ad, she kinda got what she was looking for. This one features a guy who set out for three things, told us how picky he was and how technologically savvy he was, then proceeded to buy something that wasn't even within the guidelines Mr. Picky set forth at the beginning of the ad. For that reason alone, this one should've ended up on the cutting room floor.

Giampaolo got just what he paid for. Not what he wanted; just what he paid for.