HP EliteBook 8730w Review

I have now used this laptop as my work laptop for almost 2 years.

I am a heavy user. I develop software and can have up to 4 large solutions open at 1 time. My memory usage hovers between 3 and 4 GB. I rarely shut it down, it either sleeps, or if for longer periods I will hibernate it.

I am also a photographer and often work with large (15MB) photo files in lightroom and photoshop.

As far as processing power is concerned this laptop is great, but all the great features are well outlined in the review So… I would like to point out my problems with this laptop...

1) Its heavy. The laptop itself is not too bad (which I can accept because I choose to have such a powerful machine), but the power supply is ridiculous and can surely be reduced in size...

2) The battery is held onto the machine with these 2 tiny little plastic clips! While sliding the laptop out of the leather HP bag I have the small ridges on the battery catch the bag and I had broken these clips within 1 month of owning the laptop. These clips are on the laptop, not the battery, so my battery is now held on with tape! How did this pass those durability tests???

3) The touch buttons have malfunctioned on occasion. Now I am not sure if this has been a software or hardware issue as normally putting the machine to sleep and back on again fixes the problem. It’s very frustrating trying to do a demo with 50 calculators opening!

Anyway, those are my gripes. Together with the terrible service from HP South Africa. A 2 week waiting time to get a replacement power supply (which has blown twice!), this is unacceptable for a company supplying business laptops…