HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010

The HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010 is a well-designed general-use laptop, with a large, responsive keyboard and easy access to key controls and ports. Though the display's colours are a bit subdued, the 15-inch-wide LCD screen offers accurate shades for light graphics work and a high, 1,680x1,050 resolution that accommodates large images and text documents. This rig's stereo speakers have fuller sound and more power than those on an average notebook, but they're really just window dressing on top of the HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010's powerful 1.8GHz Pentium M processor, its 60GB hard drive (upgradable to 80GB), and its ATI graphics card with 32MB of dedicated RAM. Editors note: In Australia, the fastest processor the nx7010 comes with is a 1.7GHz Pentium M processor. The nx7010 features just about every possible connection option, including FireWire and S-Video-out ports, an SD card slot, and both 802.11g and Bluetooth wireless networking. Its power and connectivity allow the nx7010 to serve as the sole PC for a demanding office user or as a semimobile digital hub for a home user.

HP calls the Compaq Business Notebook nx7010 a "thin and light" laptop; but at 2.95kg, 35.56cm wide, and 3.45cm thick, it's heavy and bulky. Though too hefty for frequent flyers, the nx7010 is light enough for those who sometimes schlep the notebook home for work at night or on the weekends. And with its optional AU$225 port replicator, which also adds a DVI-D port for high-end LCDs, you can quickly disconnect the nx7010 from and reconnect it to your office network and peripherals.

Thanks to a wide keyboard that responds to a soft touch, the HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010 is comfortable for extended use. The alphanumeric keys are full size and easy to find, but other keyboard elements, such as the directional and function keys, are rather small -- you need good aim to hit the half-height Delete or Esc keys and not mistakenly tap the larger adjacent keys. The standard-size touch pad has a dedicated scrolling section and a button that disables scrolling, which is useful if you're using an external mouse and don't want to worry about accidentally brushing your fingers over the touch pad. The nx7010 doesn't have any dedicated shortcut buttons, but the Fn key allows many standard keys to perform double duty, such as launching the default Web browser (F3) or controlling music- and DVD-playing applications (F9 to F12).

Even with its wide keyboard, the HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010 has additional room on each side to accommodate stereo speakers -- a good design choice; if they were placed lower down, the speakers would be obstructed by your hands when typing, and if placed above the keyboard, they would bounce sound off the LCD. Another nice design feature is the intuitive placement of volume-up, volume-down, and mute buttons directly above the right-hand speaker. And if you use a headphone, you can easily reach the port; it's located on the front edge of the notebook, along with the microphone jack and the on/off button for the integrated Bluetooth and 802.11g radios.

By notebook standards, the sound was quite good in our informal tests, which included a range of songs from Morcheeba to Moby to 50 Cent. Sound petered out a bit, however, with our test DVD, Pirates of the Caribbean. Though the bundled SoundMax Control Panel software features a virtual surround-sound enhancement for DVDs, we didn't notice any difference when we switched on the feature.

ATI's mobility 9200 graphics processor, with 32MB of dedicated RAM, offers enough power for light gaming. For example, DeusEx Invisible War ran smoothly and looked great on the wide screen.

The HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010 is well equipped for adding peripherals. An SD card slot on the front edge is handy for swapping data with cameras or PDAs that use this memory card format. In addition to standard fare, such as modem, LAN, VGA, and USB 2.0 ports, the back of the nx7010 has a parallel port for old-fashioned printers, a four-pin (nonpowered) FireWire port, and an S-Video-out port. The latter two, along with the wide screen, the largish 60GB (5,400rpm) hard drive, and the peppy 1.8GHz Pentium M processor, equip the nx7010 nicely as a portable video-editing workstation. But if you're thinking along those lines, be sure to order the nx7010 with the DVD+RW drive. Our unit came with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive. Unfortunately, the fixed, side-mounted optical drive is not upgradable after purchase.

You can customise other key components on the nx7010, however. Panels on the bottom of the laptop provide easy access for installing a new hard drive (up to 80GB), or adding RAM to the one accessible slot. (Our unit came with 512MB, but you can go as high as 2,048MB.) The nx7010 even has a panel that lets you easily access the system's internal battery -- a rare convenience feature on notebooks.

As is typical of business systems, the software assortment on the nx7010 is quite limited. Any business that installs custom software on the PCs they purchase won't find this troublesome, but if you're choosing this as a home PC, you'll miss bundled games and multimedia apps. The only notable extras are a 60-day trial version of Norton AntiVirus 2004 and the HP Memories Disc Creator -- a wizard-based tool for creating albums of pictures and video clips, adding music, and burning it all to CD.

The HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010 scored a 200 on the BAPCo MobileMark 2002 benchmark test--an unusual accomplishment for a notebook PC. For comparison, it scored about 2 percent higher than the similarly configured Acer TravelMate 8000 and about 4 percent below the IBM ThinkPad T42. Though the IBM's 1.7GHz processor has a slightly lower top speed, it doesn't throttle as low as the HP's 1.8GHz processor when running on battery power, which means that the IBM hemorrhages electricity while the HP nx7010 conserves it. At the end of the day, all three of these systems perform exceptionally well in mobile tests. The next section explains how such a great mobile performance score can affect battery life.

Performance analysis written by CNET Labs assistant lab manager Eric Franklin.

The HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010's battery life lasts more than four and a half hours, thanks to its 14.8V, 4,400mAh (65WHr) battery. This is about 16 percent shorter than the Acer TravelMate 8000 lasts -- its 14.8V, 4,800mAh (71WHr) battery gives it much more than five hours of life. The HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010's very high resolution of 1,680x1,050 may have contributed to its shorter battery life compared to that of the Acer TravelMate 8000, which has a resolution of 1,400x1,050. The IBM ThinkPad T42 brings up the rear with more than four hours of battery life, thanks to its less-powerful 10.8V, 4,400mAh (48WHr) battery. Four and a half hours of battery life is great for most mobile tasks.

Battery life analysis written by CNET Labs assistant lab manager Eric Franklin.

To measure mobile application performance and battery life, CNET Labs uses BAPCo's MobileMark 2002. MobileMark measures both application performance and battery life concurrently using a number of popular applications (Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator 6.0, WinZip Computing WinZip 8.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1, and Macromedia Flash 5.0).

System configurations:

Acer TravelMate 8000
Windows XP Professional; 1.8GHz Intel Pentium M; 512MB DDR SDRAM 333MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB; Hitachi 5K80 60GB 5,400rpm

HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7010
Windows XP Professional; 1.8GHz Intel Pentium M; 512MB DDR SDRAM 333MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 64MB; Toshiba MK6022GAX 60GB 5,400rpm

IBM ThinkPad T42
Windows XP Professional; 1.7GHz Intel Pentium M; 512MB DDR SDRAM 333MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 32MB; Fujitsu MHT2040AH 40GB 5,400rpm

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