Thinking of buying the 8530w...

I'm thinking of buying the HP Elitebook 8530w, and I had some questions before I plonk down money for this beast.

1. I've found better prices online with retailers like onsale.com and pcmall.com, and since I won't get charged tax, I'd like to buy from one of them. I was wondering if anyone had experience with them, and how the warranty works if you buy from somewhere other than HP. How would returns work, in case I'm not happy?

2. The standard 3/3/3 warranty is one of the things tempting me to get the 8530w. I've never bought an HP laptop before, so to those that have, is HP good with this warranty?

3. From what I understand, there isn't much difference between the P8600 and T9400 in most real-world applications. I will be running software like MATLAB, Office, Photoshop, and games, in addition to media/web browsing, etc. - will the difference be noticeable? The P8600 configs are much cheaper, and I would expect it to run cooler with better battery life.

4. Is the HP 3D DriveGuard tied to their hard drives, or will it work with any hard drive?

Thanks in advance for your help. I really, really need to get a new laptop soon and it's now between the 8530w and the ASUS G50.

 

*Bump*

(It's kind of urgent )

 

If you are gonna run MATLAB/Photoshop... .i would really recommend T9400, as Matlab is cpu intensive program and would really gain from that extra cache and speed kick.

Yes it is a trade off between getting your Matlab simulation run quicker vs battery life (btw one would not run a very cpu intensive application on battery anyways) but temperature is not a big issue.

For day-to-day applications like web surfing, playing songs, office etc... P8600 will suffice.

Games are more dependent on the GPU, and very minimal on the CPU.

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HP business range of laptops are great from what you read around in the forums, haven't owned one yet...planning to get the 8530p by xmas. Played around with Dell's Lattitude series and Thinkpad T61 (santa rose platform ones) and they both are superb in quality and in general can generally take good abuse without cracking.

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The HP 3D DriveGuard is software based, hence it *should* work on any hard drive you would like to install in the laptop.

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About the online retailers, i cannot vouch for them, i would recommend checking the BBB website also retailer's ratings website to gauge their worthiness.

MadEngineer

 

Thanks for that reply. MATLAB and Photoshop will not occupy a lot of my time - I will probably game more than I use either of those two. Plus, most of my MATLAB programs tend to be of the simple variety, designed to make repetitive homeworks easier to deal with. But, more than the heat/battery, I'm leaning towards the P8600 because the pre-configured 8530w models with it are a lot cheaper than the T9400 ones.

 

Sure go ahead with the P9600 then, it will be good with your requirements.