HP Compaq Business Notebook Nc8430

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Look & Feel	Good
Comfort & Portability	Excellent
Robustness & Durability	Excellent
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	its very portable
Disadvantages:	price and lack of ram and hard drive

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

The design of this laptop isn’t really anything to shout out about, and in some sense its even quite ugly. I however quite like its design, even though its quite basic and its only a one colour laptop. Its all black, which usually I hate as it makes a laptop look dull and boring, however this one doesn’t come across as dull and boring and I think the reason for this must be how thin the laptop looks, it actually comes across as really thin and sleek and looks really cool, yet defying the black coloured look.

The installed ram on this laptop is an average 1 gb. This is ok but could have been dramatically improved if it was a 2gb of ram.
The ram can however be upgraded, and it can be upgraded to a maximum of 4 gb so if this is something you think you could do your self then you could easily buy cheap ram off eBay and install it yourself, however if you don’t know what your doing then this could be quite a costly process and might not be worth doing. However it really would make a huge difference to the performance of this laptop.
This laptop however does still run really fast despite its smallish ram. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo T2500 processor which runs at speeds of 2 Ghz. This is really good processor speeds and makes this laptop be able to perform fast and load those demanding programs quickly.

Its hard drive is also only average, its got 80 gb’s which seems to be about the minimum they are making new laptops with these days. It is a fair amount however as most of the software and all your operating system should only take up about 20 gb of space so you’ll still have a whole 60 gb of hard drive to store what ever you want on, this might not be enough for some people but I save a lot of my data, music and pictures on portable hard drives any way so that it doesn’t slow don my laptop, so this hard drive space isn’t a problem for me.

There are many things making this laptop ultra portable, firstly its quite small, it also has a smaller screen size than most laptop. It has a 15.4 inch TFT screen, which is only about an inch smaller than most laptop screens a will take little getting used to. It also has active matrix technology. This is something being used by more and more laptop manufacturers to date, and its amazing results. Its makes the screen lighter, meaning the laptops lighter, its makes the screen sharper, the pictures shaper and brighter too and makes the whole computing experience so much better.
It also only weighs 2.7 kg which is a nice weight for a laptop, it means you wont really feel all that weigh on your shoulder if you do have to carry it around with you all day.
The real reason why it’s a great portable laptop is its battery life though, it can last 4 hours and that’s because of its 8 cell lithium battery. This has two more than most laptops have which means it can last a lot longer than most.

Because this laptop is made for business men, it comes with windows vista business, this means it also comes with some extra features and software you wouldn’t get with other editions of vista. You’ll get Intervideo WinDVD, HP Quick Launch Button Software, HP ProtectTools Security Manager, HP Client Manager Software (free download), HP Help and Support, HP Wireless Assistant, Synaptics Touchpad Driver, Norton Internet Security (60 days subscription), HP Backup and Recovery Manager, Roxio Easy Media Creator 9, HP OpenView Radia Management Agent, HP QuickLook, HP Universal Print Driver. All these programs are free to install and use, however some are just demos for a limited number of days.

If you want a fast portable laptop then this is great, it will cost around £600 though which is quite expensive for a laptop that only has 80gb of hard drive and just 1gb of ram. This might put you off it however it is very portable and its got fantastic battery life as well as looking a lot nicer than most laptops designed for business men and portability so altogether it’s a fantastic laptop.