I will disclose the obvious, I am biased toward HP products. That said, my company recently swapped out our laptops under contract from a competitive brand to the HP Elitebook 8440p. I was really happy to say the least! After having been around the HP Pavilion product line and the HP Mini 110 lines for quite a while, I was shopping for a new personal laptop and the 8440p really hit the button for me. I called HP small business sales and had a very informative discussion with a salesman and he informed me that the 8460p was the newer replacement and that I would find it might even be affordable compared to the older model.Now for some details:
Processor is the iCore5 and it can be upgraded in the future because it has the ZIF mount. Also, the specs. were not clear but there are two memory banks and it comes with a 4gb filled in one so you have usable memory if you want to upgrade. (I remember the days of getting your memory in smaller size and populating all banks so that if you wanted to upgrade, you needed to chuck them all and start fresh).
I got looking at my optical drive and since I had a spare new blue ray player / dvd burner slim sata drive, I thought what the heck, wonder if it would work? yup! now if you might like the fact that you do not need tools to pull the cover off to access the memory and hard drive area, and your Windows COA label is now protected under the battery so you won't have them become damaged and worn off like on my previous model.
graphics and sounds are very good for a laptop, especially a business one. very neat features like built in smart card reader, finger print scanner, business card scanner, USB3 ports, express-card expansion slot, ability for docking station and secondary battery attachment. the construction of this laptop is very solid and rugged. I feel like the price I paid was very much of a steal for what I got compared to the normal plastic computers at the box stores. the positive latching lid, multiple wireless options, battery configurations and endless power with the HP super battery (I don't remember their name for it, but they have one) all add up to make one heck of a desktop killer. I can honestly say that with the docking station and the processor and memory options, I am ready to retire the desktop!
too many other good things about this to list, but maybe another owner will pick up the football and run with it.
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I received this laptop through my school's Campus HP program, and I have to say, it is a very well built laptop all round. Feels sturdy as a rock, lifting the lid is easy with the big release button. There is slight flex in the screen though but this is not a big issue. The rest of the body is very very sturdy. The keyboard is one of the best keyboards I have ever worked on, hands down. I am extremely impressed. That said, I do not like the new format for the arrow/directional keys one bit. Making them half the size of a regular key to save space was a terrible idea and gives rise to quite many unintended key presses. But besides that it is an absolute delight to work on this keyboard. I only wish it was backlit or had a backlit-version as an optional upgrade. The touchpad is very responsive, but the extra multi-touch settings, etc are a headache to work with and I recommend getting a mouse for your work. The touchpad is great but because of the problems I mentioned, only really good for the odd surfing. Scrolling is a pain hence get a mouse.
The Screen though, is one of the most terrible screens I have ever worked with. This particular screen is the 1366x768 screen, and I have worked with the 1600x900 screen as well and there is no marked improvement. It has a matte finish which is excellent, although the only good thing about it sadly. The color range is appalling. I am a graphic design student and have messed up some of my projects on this with the screen displaying one color and the studio's printer giving me something else. I have to resort to the school's iMacs for that, sadly. I am extremely disappointed in this screen, which also has terrible viewing angles you have to have it angled straight at you or it stresses your eyes out really fast. Audio quality of the speakers, too, is extremely, extremely bad. One of the worst speakers ever I feel embarrassed to playback audio/video clips in class using my laptop because of its pathetic sound reproduction as well as low volume output. Highly suggest you get headphones or connect this laptop to proper speakers for any music listening because it will butcher your tracks.
Performance wise, the processor is zippy and extremely fast; at the very last this get your work done for the next 2-3 years with ease. It overclocks marvelously with Turbo boost. The graphics option is really embarrassing though and I wish this came with a better option than the AMD chip it has (Mine does not even have that). For a laptop in the range of (and above) $1100, I expect at least a mid range card considering that competing brands have such options a card like the nvidia GT 540m would have made this laptop an absolute steal. Thus for the aforementioned reasons do not even think about playing any games on this laptop Call of Duty Black Ops stutters at around 25-30fps at best with all settings set at the lowest. Not impressive at all. The reason I recommend a better card is not for gaming, it is because I desire a good performer that can handle anything thrown at it to a somewhat respectable level, not dig its own grave and bury itself in it, like when I ran the music and gaming tests. Tad Imbalanced, huh? Hard drive performance is strictly OKAY for a 7200rpm drive. HP has its bloatware and I highly recommend you get rid of it to avoid the atrociously long boot times. Also, please do not update your BIOS to anything above F.20 (at the time of writing this review) because HP disables SATA III support on later BIOS releases. So if you have an SSD (which is an absolutely recommended upgrade) on this, your speeds will be badly throttled. Kudos, HP.
Upgrading this laptop is not difficult removing the bottom cover is extremely easy and swapping RAM in particular is extremely easy. You can also get an upgrade caddy to replace the optical drive and thus run two hard drives like I am. The layout is clean and very impressive, but this leads me to my next disappointment this laptop runs HOT and can be really loud. Don't even think of playing games, this thing heats up to around 90'C which is TERRIBLE for a non-gaming laptop, because the components are not designed to withstand such temperatures. Consequently, the fans kick and run loud trying as they work hard to cool down. This laptop has a terrible cooling system. A cooler is highly recommended, and repasting the CPU paste with better aftermarket paste is advised if you know how to get that done.
The webcam is of decent quality, the small light meant to light up your keyboard in the dark is almost useless since the screen is actually brighter. The presence of one Powered USB2.0, 2 USB3.0 ports and an eSATA/USB2.0 port is a very commendable attachment since not many laptops have the powered port (useful for charging your stuff even with the laptop off), USB3 ports or the eSATA port. The lack of an HDMI port is extremely disappointing but the DisplayPort is hardly a consolation. There is VGA for connecting to projectors for the businessmen. Also, battery life of this laptop is good, ranging around the 4-hour mark, and about 40-50 minutes more if you turn down the brightness and turn off wireless connections. I expect better from a laptop of this form factor and a lower TDP processor (35W versus 45W), though, but this is still good. Wireless range is good with the Intel 6250 card though nothing to write home about. It works inconsistently. Another strange issue with this laptop is the fact that it sometimes refuses to shut down/hibernate/sleep. It completes any of those actions you picked, but then restarts on itself within a matter of seconds. The only way to stop this is by manually removing the battery. Also, sometimes the multimedia shortcuts (fn + f6/f7/f9/f10) for the brightness and volume refuse to work at all sometimes, and only a restart fixes this. Likewise, the two USB3 ports on the side also just stop working occasionally. This can only be rectified by a hard restart.
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Thus:
Pros: Great processing power and speeds; Good battery life; Excellent keyboard; Good (sometimes inconsistent) wireless connectivity, USB3 + USBpowered ports; Good trackpad (minus multitouch); Wonderful build quality; Good warranty; Open to upgradeability (RAM and CPU);
Cons: Terrible audio and 3d performance; Terrible performance under 32-bit Windows 7 (64bit has no problems); HP bloatware; Horrible, horrible screen (the deal breaker for me); random bugs with multimedia keys and shutting down/hibernating/sleep mode; Terrible cooling system, runs hot, runs loud; Starts-up randomly for no reason sometimes despite being shutdown.
Conclusion: The only reason I have this laptop is because the school requires me to have it for my second major which is business. The school's 4-year complete coverage warranty is also another incentive. I have already bought another laptop for myself and am leaving this for the most basic tasks such as web-surfing, word-processing and running business software. It is a good laptop for businessmen who don't need much but just want good build quality, or the odd college student who needs to do the most basic of work it should thus be priced much lower in my opinion for its rather low usefulness. To anyone else, I cannot recommend this. You would be better off buying a slightly more expensive Macbook 13" or even the Macbook Air, or for less expensive options you could take a look at the Acer Aspire line or a Sony Vaio for a good looking, well built all round laptop. Sticking to HP? Go for the Envy line, they are much better overall although not as well built or with such good battery life. However the terrible speakers which will embarrass you and kill your ears, and the terrible screen which leaves much to be desired are easily the biggest turn offs that, sadly, offset the otherwise great keyboard and build quality to the point where I cannot recommend this to anyone. Hopefully they will do better with the next line of Elitebooks...
OVERALL: 3.5 / 5Love the computer hate the display. Can't work on it for more then 20 minutes without connecting an external display. I'm not a big fan of the touchpad, two finger scrolling is glitchy. The computer is rather heavy as well.
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