HP EliteBook 8440p review
HP's latest 14in business laptop has an attractive metal design, but is it all style and no substance? Kat Orphanides reveals all in our review.
The EliteBook 8440p is beautifully made, performed brilliantly in our benchmark tests and even had a decent four hour, 43 minute battery life under light usage. However, despite its many strengths, at this price we were disappointed to find only 2GB of memory and a meagre 250GB hard disk. The lengthy three-year return to base warranty goes a long way to making up for this, though, and touchstick users, who aren't widely catered for beyond Lenovo's ThinkPad range, will find the 8440p to be one of their better options.Most of the features the laptop is missing – more memory and a larger hard disk, for instance – are relatively cheap and easy to upgrade, but this only makes their absence more surprising. If you're paying £950 for a laptop, we don't think you should have to upgrade just to get a large amount of hard disk space. Nonetheless, if you can put up with these omissions, the EliteBook 8440p is a good general-purpose laptop.
The laptop comes with a range of extra security features, most of which are available from the BIOS. These include TPM DriveLock password protected encryption for your hard disk's contents and the ability to disable USB and other ports to prevent users for taking information off a laptop on an external disk.
Verdict
The EliteBook 8440p is beautifully made, performed brilliantly in our benchmark tests and even had a decent four hour, 43 minute battery life under light usage. However, despite its many strengths, at this price we were disappointed to find only 2GB of memory and a meagre 250GB hard disk. The lengthy three-year return to base warranty goes a long way to making up for this, though, and touchstick users, who aren't widely catered for beyond Lenovo's ThinkPad range, will find the 8440p to be one of their better options. Most of the features the laptop is missing – more memory and a larger hard disk, for instance – are relatively cheap and easy to upgrade, but this only makes their absence more surprising. If you're paying £950 for a laptop, we don't think you should have to upgrade just to get a large amount of hard disk space. Nonetheless, if you can put up with these omissions, the EliteBook 8440p is a good general-purpose laptop.
Processor: Intel Core i5 520M, 2.4GHz Memory: 2GB 1,333MHz DDR3 RAM Graphics: Intel HD Graphics Hard disk: 250GB hard disk Display: 14in 1,366 x 768 pixels, LED-backlit screen Features: microphone, stereo speakers Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR Ports: 3 x USB2, 1 x USB2/eSATA combo, 1 x FireWire 400, DisplayPort and VGA video outputs, 3.5mm headphone and microphone audio outputs Dimensions: 336x236x31mm (WxDxH) Weight: 2.4kg Warranty: 3yr C&R warranty OS: Windows 7 Professional 32-bit Part code: WJ681ET#ABU BENCHMARKS IMAGE 112 VIDEO 99 MULTIPLE APPLICATIONS 75 OVERALL 93 BATTERY LIFE Light usage 4h43m Heavy usage 1h33m POWER CONSUMPTION Sleep 0.3W Idle 17W Active 49W PART CODE WJ681ET#ABU
-
Is ChatGPT making us dumber? A new MIT study claims using AI tools causes cognitive issues, and it’s not the first – Microsoft has already warned about ‘diminished independent problem-solving’News A recent study from MIT suggests that using AI tools impacts brain activity, with frequent users underperforming compared to their counterparts.
-
Hackers are using Microsoft 365 features to bombard enterprises with phishing emails – and they’ve already hit more than 70 organizationsNews A new phishing campaign uncovered by researchers at Varonis shows threat actors are abusing Microsoft 365's Direct Send feature to launch phishing attacks.
-
Plans announced to resurrect former steelworks as a ‘green’ data centerNews Plans have been put forward to transform the former Ravenscraig steelworks in Scotland into a green AI data center.
