Leader Of The Pack
Once a luxury set aside for only top executives, notebook computers have since become commonplace across the entire workforce. As manufacturers began to design systems for specific segments, the business laptop is now an established template, with subsets of its own. The CRN Test Center ran a bake-off looking at six offerings of this popular class of notebooks.
While it was virtually an overall tie on the scorecard, Hewlett-Packard's Elitebook 2530p (left), managed to pull out ahead of the pack with a solid design, above average feature set, and nice performance for its specifications. Although not specifically marketed as a rugged notebook, the 2530p qualifies in the business rugged category, meeting military standards (MIL-STD 810F) for drops, vibration, dust, extreme temperatures, and humidity.
Using Primate Labs' Geekbench2 benchmarking software, our review unit scored 2255, which is not bad considering the relatively slow 1.87- GHz Core 2 Duo L9400 running it. The 3 GB of RAM most likely helped keep the score respectable.
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