Short review: 8460p with two hard drives

Hi all,
I'm almost done setting up my partner's new Elitebook 8460p and I wanted to share my impressions. This laptop was purchased by our university, and is totally tricked out for bioinformatics processing power.

- Quadcore i7-2720QM QC
- 8 gb RAM
- 128 gb SSD built in
- bay has installed another 500 gb, 7200 rpm HDD (so no extra battery or DVD drive)
- Windows 7 pro 64 bit

All in all, this is an impressive laptop.

Appearance and weight: Very sleek, EXTREMELY durable feel. This computer not only looks good, but feels like I could drop it off the table and it would shug it off, but in a powerful and sturdy way, not overbearing like a toughbook. All the hinges are tight, without any flex. The buttons press satisfyingly - even the power button just feels "well made". Speaking of buttons and such, it's all very minimalistic, which I quite like, but so much so that the little lights at the front (indicators for wireless, power, charging, and hard drive, I assume) are hard to see. My biggest complaint is the weight. The computer is just very dense, which I guess is what gives it that premium feel.

Keyboard and mouse: fantastic. The first chiclet keyboard I've used, and now that I'm comfortable on it, I don't want to go back to my old crappy toshiba (thankfully, I can transition to my personal computer, a lenovo e420s, which should also have a great keyboard). The keys are easy to press and satisfying, and I can pound away and feel like the computer doesn't even notice me. The mouse is great, very responsive. The material on the buttons is interestingly textured - I don't know how to describe it, almost fabric-y or velvety... I like it! Multitouch is smooth. Pinch and zoom is especially responsive, and two-fingered scrolling works well though sometimes activates a bit jerkily. I don't use the trackpoint, and it doesn't get in my way (which had been a fear).

Screen: first off, I am NOT a screen maven. For me, the high resolution 1600x900 is great, and the matte screen is neither dazzling nor frustrating. It just seems to work quite well for basic use, true colors, clean text, can be very bright. Viewing angles are narrow, but that feels normal to me. As I said, I'm not a screen person.

Performance: WOW. Just, wow. This computer is a beast. It hasn't made a sound or come close to even touching its processing power. Of course, I haven't done anything difficult with it yet - but many windows open, installing, modifying, watching videos, etc it is totally seamless. It feels like a porsche. Thanks to the SSD, it's totally silent, and since I turned off the fan settings in the BIOS, I honestly don't think I can hear it at all. It starts up in under 20 seconds, including login, and shuts down in well under 10. I did benchmark it, and the numbers seem very fast to me (attached).

Setup of OS, SSD, HDD: This was interesting to me, as though I am technically inclined, I'm a newbie at actually doing detailed tinkering. Windows came installed on the SSD, as I expected, and after installing programs comes to about 30 gb. I had NOT expected that the HP-TOOLS partition and the HP-RECOVERY partition would also be on the SSD, together taking up almost 20 gigs of unuseable space. I used partition magic to make empty room on my D: drive, and then copied HP-TOOLS and HP-RECOVERY into the empty space. I then deleted the original two partitions, and made a new partition I called E:FastData. I suppose I could have simply expanded the C: partition to emcompass the new free space, but I wasn't sure if doing that would mess with the alignment etc... so this seems to work well. In terms of the operating system, I pointed each folder (my documents, my music, my pictures, etc) to a new folder on the D: drive to actually hold the bulk data. I did install virtualbox and am running 64-bit debian successfully and seamlessly, after enabling virtualization in the BIOS.

Why I didn't do a clean install: lazyness. By the time I was messing around with the partitions, I had already done a ninite installation of basic programs and had arranged the user folders. The computer is running so fast, I don't regret not taking that time. Additionally, some of the HP programs seems worthwhile - the power assistant and connection managers are easy-to-access control points for turning on and off bluetooth, wireless, controlling button behavior, etc. The bloatware was minimal - norton, a few other easy-to-recognite sample programs. I think I might uninstall the ProtectTools suite, as this is not actually being used for business and security is not a huge concern.

All in all, final thoughts: Impressive, understated, extremely powerful machine. I wish it was a bit lighter, but recognize that the premium build quality has to weigh something. I feel like this computer is built to last and perform, and I'm very happy with it!

 

Thanks for doing the review. This is not the exact model I am interested in but it's still informative to have as many opinions on the 8X60 series as possible. Hopefully you'll be as happy with your Lenovo.