Product Reviews

While the perception of many when you mention HP is consumer-friendly printers and budget laptops, the company's Compaq-branded branch certainly knows how to put a high-end notebook together. With its low-profile chassis and solid build quality allied to the charcoal-grey finish, there's no doubting the nw8240's gravitas, even before you start looking at the specifications.

It isn't fair to simply describe this machine as a laptop though: it's truly a mobile workstation, replete with the fastest Pentium M processor, running at 2.13GHz, allied to ATi's Mobility FireGL workstation-level graphics adaptor with 128MB of dedicated frame-buffer memory.

We used 3ds Max 7 in render preview mode to test the grunt of the FireGL chipset, and saw the unit complete the 100 frames of our complex 200,000-polygon test animation in just 27 seconds. It's a fine result, and just one second slower than Fujitsu Siemens' Celsius H230. In the real world, both machines will easily meet the basic requirement for any OpenGL and DirectX design applications, and will cope with up to medium-level complexity before you need to start resorting to adaptive degradation.

But the nw8240 adds some hard-hitting advantages over the Fujitsu too. The H230's screen was good; the nw8240's is better, being a lovely 15.4in widescreen, with its native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 exceeding the majority of desktop monitors. As always with very high-resolution notebook TFTs, this can be a double-edged sword; at native resolution, the Start button is just 9mm wide and other Desktop furniture and text equally tiny.

However, so long as your eyesight's up to it, the screen is a huge boon for any kind of design or graphics work. HP has resisted any temptation to put a glossy X-black style finish on the screen too, with the very effective anti-reflective coating leading to a relaxed experience free of distracting reflections from windows or lights.

HP hasn't spoiled the work put into the screen by skimping on the rest of the human-computer interfaces. The nw8240's keyboard is one of the best we've tried for a long time: solid but not lifeless; plenty of travel but still crisp. Typing is bliss and there's practically no rattle. You get both a touchpad and trackpoint for mouse-cursor control, both of which are great

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examples of their type. The touchpad's buttons are rubberised, but it's a taste easily acquired.

Above the keyboard lie six shortcut keys, providing the key functions for a business tool used on the road: mute and volume up/down; a Presentation key, allowing you to start up PowerPoint, put the machine into an appropriate power scheme so the screen won't blank out, and switch to an external display if necessary; and a wireless power key that simultaneously enables or disables both the Bluetooth and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi adaptors.

There's also an innocuous-looking Info key, which loads the customised HP Info Center app. This includes HP ProtectTools Security Manager, allowing comprehensive control of all system passwords including BIOS and Windows logon, plus the ability to register hardware smartcards - a smartcard reader sits between the SD card and PC Card slots on the left of the machine - or USB-based hardware logon keys. In addition, you can disable any or all of the external interfaces such as the serial port, floppy drive and SD card slot. It's a neat one-stop application and completely integrated into the hardware, eliminating any digging around in the BIOS or disparate Windows tools.

You get generous numbers of ports around the nw8240's chassis, and they're thoughtfully placed too. Two USB ports on the right - separated enough that it's unlikely two connectors will physically interfere - will deal with an external keyboard and mouse, while you can pop a USB flash drive into a third port on the left. The only obvious omissions are a parallel port and PS/2 connectors, but a serial port is still present. Mini-FireWire, fast infrared, Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet, a 56K modem, an S-Video output, VGA and audio out complete the comprehensive output picture. The optical drive is, naturally, a dual-layer DVD writer.

In terms of everyday application performance, the HP is a touch behind the Elonex MediaStar, but the nw8240 was actually 1 per cent faster than our reference Pentium D desktop PC in our 2D graphics tests. And if you want to play the occasional game, you won't be too disappointed: at 1,280 x 1,024, the nw8240 managed 24fps in Far Cry even with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing.

Battery life is respectable enough for lightweight work, pulling in four hours, 28 minutes under light use. Heavyweight CPU and hard disk grinding brought that down to one hour, 40 minutes. Considering all the power it contains and size of the screen, the nw8240 is no bucket of lard. At just 2.8kg, it's a full 400g lighter than the H230, enough to make a noticeable difference when carrying it around.

The nw8240 impresses us by being focused and rational in its design and, as a result, getting everything almost exactly spot on. If price is an issue, you could get a faster, lighter machine for less, but this level of quality never comes cheap.