Enter the Dragon
This is a different post than I would normally make, a bit of a public service announcement more than anything. HP, for the entire month of May, have decided to give away one of their HDX Dragon laptops every day this month. That’s a total of 31 giveaways for those counting. The only bad part about this is that I’m sort of late to the game, so if you haven’t heard of the contest until just now then we’re almost halfway through the month so you’ve missed out on a few chances to win one. That being said, there’s still 16 more chances to go.
If you haven’t heard of these machines they’re the epitome of a mobile desktop replacement – in fact it might as well be a mobile desktop computer. It has a 21" screen that has two hinges so that you can adjust it up and down plus back and forth. It comes with a full keyboard number pad and all, plus has room for a remote control dock. Did I mention the Dragon is an awesome media machine? Besides having the 21" widescreen, it also has a blu-ray player and co-ax hook up so you can easily get your cable TV rocking. It’s perfect if you’re a fan of Windows Media Center like I am.
Although you can outfit the Dragon with different hardware on HP’s site (they also refer to it as the HDX Entertainment notebook, Dragon was the codename) the one in the contest is absolutely stacked. A Core2 Extreme X9000 processor clocked at 2.8ghz, 4 gigs of RAM, Vista x64 so you can take advantage of that 4 gigs, a GeForce 8800M GTS graphics card so you can play a stack of games, 500 gigabyte hard drive…that’s really just the beginning. Not only that but it comes with software, 3 games (Gears of War, Viva Piñata, Microsoft Flight Simulator X), and 3 blu-ray movies to boot – all in all the package is worth $5100 if you bought it in a store. Not a bad deal at all, plus with so many chances to win it’s really worth some attention.
So how do the giveaways work? Well HP shipped out the bundles that included not only the HDX Dragon laptop but also all of the accoutrements (software, games, moves, etc.) to a bunch of different blogs. The people who run each blog were charged with the task of first reviewing the machine and then finally deciding how to give it away. Everything has been in their hands really, they can create a contest, have people submit stories or really anything you can think of. Once that’s all done they choose either randomly or based on the quality of entry the person who gets the HDX Dragon. That makes for not only a lot of interesting contests but also a wide array of contest types. For example, some blogs might have you just answer a few questions then out of the people who answer the questions correctly a winner will be chosen at random. Others will ask for some sort of entry which can be judged against the other entries, and whoever submits the best work will win.
I’ve participated in 3 or 4 of the contests so far and I have to say it’s been fun just getting excited about the potential to win one of the HDX Dragons even if I don’t win (I haven’t, by the way =P). The first one I tried out was over at Absolute Vista, John Obeto who runs the blog decided he wanted people to send in stories about how the HDX Dragon would improve their lives and why they needed one all while being funny and canning the sob stories. I entered roughly a week before the winner was announced and I wish I hadn’t, because if I had put more time into my story I probably would have faired a lot better. Some of the stories people came up with were full on fiction novels and I didn’t really expect that. Still, being apart of the community (chilling in the forums, mostly) during that week was pretty fun, and besides if you don’t win one of the contests there are still 30 others, right?
Next up I tried out the contest at Barb’s Connected World which was a little more straight forward. All I had to do was search through the posts on her blog for a hidden picture and then answer a few questions about some of the topics she’s blogged in the past. There were only 4 questions and it took me maybe a total of 15 minutes to answer them so I was able to get my submission in right away. Of course the easier the contest is the more likely it is people will enter so despite getting the answer right I wasn’t the one chosen (she used Random.org to select a winner from all of the people who got the questions right) but it was still fun.
I have a couple of other entries into two other contests going right now, the winner hasn’t been announced for those particular drawings yet though. I just wanted to blog about this so that if anyone wanted to try it out they could, and it might drive a few extra hits to the people’s blogs who are doing the contests. If you plan on entering one of the contests, good luck! You can find a list of the contests that are still going right here.
Now Playing:
Canibus – Give It More
Grand Theft Auto 4, The Matrix Online
