FOR corporations looking to deploy notebooks in large quantities the under $1,900, the HP Compaq 6530b is an attractive offer.
Of all the notebooks in this roundup, this silver black machine from HP has the most comfortable keyboard and touchpad buttons, with sufficiently firm and springy keys. Plus, the semi-rough keyboard surface prevents fingers from slipping and hitting the wrong buttons.
HP Compaq 6530b
From $1,899
Equally important is HP's DuraKey coating over the keys which prevents characters from fading.
The 2.4kg appliance is not the lightest in this round-up but it is 1cm thinner than the Toshiba Tecra M10.
Features like HP's 3D Driveguard and thicker rubber pads below protect the hard drive from knocks and bumps. And HP's new DuraFinish technology protects the notebook from scratches, paint cracks and peels (visible wear and tear are notorious in older notebooks).
A 14.1-inch widescreen display makes opening two windows side by side - say, for a Word document and an Internet page - easy.
Connectivity options, like wired and wireless networking and multi-memory card reader for data transfer to and from the notebook are decent.
Four USB ports, for example, are equally spread around the notebook (two on each side) with enough space between each of them.
Equipped with an Intel Core2 Duo 2.4GHz processor with 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, the notebook scores 5.3 points for its processor performance on the Windows Experience Index.
No surprises in the area of graphics performance either. This notebook scores only 759 points on the 3DMark 06 benchtest. Finally, the notebook lasts just 120 minutes - the shortest battery life in this round-up.
This article was first published in Digital Life, The Straits Times on Oct 15, 2008.
