HP EliteBook 6930p

Hi there,

I'm gonna jump straight in and tell you all I can about this laptop.

First off the size:
Small, compact and slick. I have no problems getting this into my back pack let alone my laptop case. Honestly I could just carry this around under my arm really without any trouble.
The 6930p is small than a news paper and about 5cm longer & wider than an A4 sheet of paper.

Weight: The HP is not very light really. In my opinion it's quite heavy for a device of this size.
I reckon it’s about 2 and a half Kg. You might say that's not very heavy, but considering the size of the laptop, I think it is quite deceptive.

The body of this laptop is made from brushed metal, which I personally really like. I'm not a particular fan of shiny plastics as they tend to love attracting fingerprints.
You won't have that problem with this laptop.

When you open the lid, you are presented with a wealth of keys and buttons that lets you know, this is a fully featured laptop that is made to provide the best experience possible for the user on the move.

Full QWERTY key board as you would expect with 'Home, pg up/dwn, End, Insert/Prt Scrn, pause, Scroll/Num Lk and all your usual shortcut keys, so no scrimping there.

HP have also gone all out and incorporated a really handy touch sensitive shortcut bar at the top of the keyboard that allows you quick access to features like, wifi, mute, HP info centre, presentation mode and settings and even a touch volume slider to adjust the volume (It isn't as responsive as I would like though and sometimes the volume goes way too high or too low). This bar also serves as the lights for your num scroll and caps lock indicators.

If we move further down the keyboard there is an inbuilt mouse dial mad of rubber similar to the IBM style rubber style. This too is made of rubber and allows very precise control of the cursor. Under the space bar are also you left and right mouse buttons which are your standard buttons really. They are not the clicky type though; they are the actual buttons you press down. They are very responsive and there is no question as to whether you double clicked on something or not as the buttons are fully independent and move individually from the laptop and each other.

Quite interestingly enough HP have also built in a touch pad with another two left and right mouse buttons directly below this!
Not sure why they have taken this approach though. Only thing I can think of is to give user maximum options and comfort when using the machine.

The touch pad is very responsive and has the right side dedicated to scrolling up and down, but it will not zoom in and out, even when holding CTRL.

Another nice feature that this little laptop has is a fingerprint scanner/reader. This allows you to set up the laptop to only allow access to someone with a registered finger (or thumb print). I personally don't use this feature, but I know some of my colleagues with the same laptop who do. I have tried it on theirs and if I'm honest it’s more of a novelty than anything really. Yes it does work well and yes it does provide extra security from Boot, but it can get annoying when it doesn't recognise you straight away, or if like on one of my cousins laptops, you have it set to request a finger scan when resuming from screen saver or standby. But it is an extra cool feature if you want it.

The 6930p has 3 USB ports (two left 1 right) Ethernet and modem sockets, Headphone and MIC jacks, An SD/MMC card reader on the front, fire wire port and VGA out.

Another cool feature that the elite book has is a handy key board light built into the top of the screen. I initially couldn't work out what the hell a light was doing at the top of the screen, but after playing around a bit worked out that it lit up the keys below pretty decently in the dark. Not the best distribution of light I must add, but still a handy little feature nonetheless.

Now I am not too sure about other models with the same name (6930p), but mine does not have a webcam. I have heard other people saying that it does, but mine doesn't, so I cannot review that particular feature I’m afraid.

The 6930 has some decent speakers built into the front of the laptop and they put out some pretty good sound for standard speakers compared to some others I have heard, but they are nothing special. Good enough for a quite film for one or listening to some mellow tunes while writing reviews on Ciao.

Okay moving onto performance.

My 6930p runs on an Intel P8700 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB ram. In this day and age, that is kinda standard really in my opinion and you will be hard pressed to find many quality laptops such as this with anything lower.

Taking that into consideration, the 6930p doesn't really perform as I would have like for a computer of such spec.

Programs take... Not long exactly to load, but at they same time they are not quick. Mine only has the basics installed I.E MS office (Word, Excel, PwrPnt, Outlk etc) Internet explorer, windows media player 10 and adobe reader 9. No music, No Pictures and No videos...

So you can see that although, I don't have much on it, I am still aware of a lack of performance. You can change the power options, but in all honesty, they don't make much difference.

I am a little disappointed in the performance of this laptop really and was expecting a bit more from it, especially as I got it brand new. Plus I am running windows XP, which takes up no where near as much processing power as later versions of windows like Vista and 7, so theoretically the computer, should be running relatively fast.

Anyway aside from the lack of power and speed, the 6930p does have quite good battery life and lasts at least 4 and a half hours on a full charge.
In my opinion this is brilliant as I have other high end laptops such as Sony Vaios that have only lasted an hour even on power save mode!

Graphically, the 6930p doesn't do much.
It has the standard Intel version 4 graphics chipset, which in all honesty...Sucks.
You will be hard pressed to run any modern games on this machine let alone at a decent frame rate.
You will have no problem with online flash games etc, but don't think you're going to be booting up GTA4 or COD: MW 2 and having a hard core LAN sesh anytime soon!

The HP has a good, reliable and fast CD & DVD Re-Writer that makes easy work of burning all types of files and media. No complaints there.

Since this is a business focused laptop it comes pre-installed with Windows Vista Business, which is pretty much the same as Home Premium with a few extra business functions. But like I said, I'm running XP, so I don't use the Vista Business at all. I will say though, that it can run all the same programs and functions as normal Windows Vista and if you intend on using the OS for personal use, you will have no problems at all.

All in all, The Elite book 6930p is a nice little machine that handles basic tasks like email, web browsing and documents well and with no hassle.
It is not too hot on media, although it can run pretty much everything you throw at it, just not as well as some more high end or performance focused machines.

A good buy if you are an employer looking to outfit your employees with good long lasting quality machines or if you are a business user who needs the same.