Review: HP Compaq NX7400 (RH393ET) notebook

Notebooks from HP Compaq have impressed us over the past 12 months, not just in terms of price and performance, but also with their excellent battery life. The NX7400 may be by far the cheapest system on test here, but its ability to spend hours away from the mains makes everything else look seriously under par.

Clocking up an impressive three-and-a-half hours before shutting down, the NX7400 may use cheaper, less powerful components than some here, but its capabilities as a portable computer are strong.

Those who want a notebook for business, forgoing fancy multimedia features, are more likely to have battery life near the top of their list of requirements. To put it into perspective, in our Mobilemark benchmarks the HP Compaq lasted twice as long as the Rock and Evesham.

The secret of this Core 2 Duo notebook’s low price of just £669 is in the components. The T5500 processor is the slowest that Intel has to offer, running its two cores at 1.66GHz. It features 2MB of L2 cache rather than the 4MB of more upmarket models, and an FSB of 667MHz, but it’s still capable of running most software applications at perfectly acceptable speeds.

A more salient point is the 512MB of Ram. This is the real killer for modern memory-hungry apps and operating systems and we’d recommend upgrading to at least 1GB (there’s space for up to 4GB inside). HP claims the NX7400 is Vista Capable, so – with extra memory – it should be reasonably future-proof.

After chugging through our benchmark tests, the HP gave us scores of 198 in Sysmark and 3,065 in PCmark05. These were among the lowest scores in the group, with only the Hi-Grade performing slightly worse in Sysmark.

The 60GB hard disk is, again, below the average size in this group. In today’s megabyte-hungry world, it won’t keep you going for long, and even iPods now have bigger drives, so consider investing in an external storage device.

What’s also disappointing is the CD-RW/DVD combo drive. We thought these died out a long time ago, since most manufacturers have moved to dual-layer DVD recording. Again, the need for an external storage device becomes ever more apparent – but this is again indicative of the price.

The 15.4in LCD widescreen display is a decent size but it will only support a maximum resolution of 1,280x800. Intel’s 950 graphics chipset can share up to 224MB of system memory if needed but is nowhere near powerful enough to excite us with fast-moving 3D game graphics; a score of 464 in 3Dmark05 and a stuttering 8.12fps frame rate in Far Cry underline this.

On the connectivity front the NX7400 does the bare minimum, with three USB ports, VGA, mini-Firewire and a PC Card slot; there’s no sign of DVI, digital audio or an Express Card slot.

In fairness to HP, the NX7000 is billed as a business notebook, so all-singing, all-dancing multimedia features are largely superfluous for a road-warrior’s laptop.

From the look and feel of point of view, the HP Compaq is comfortable to type on and use, but there’s nothing to get excited about. The 2.6kg (excluding adapter) weight ticks the right box, though, as do the various business-oriented software protection tools and utilities that HP includes.

The standard warranty is one-year collect and return, with a further one-year warranty on the battery.

This article is part of a group test of budget Core 2 Duo notebooks .
See also:
Evesham Voyager C530,
Hi-grade Notino D7000-5500,
MSI Megabook M662,
Rock Pegasus 665-T56,
Sony VGN-C1Z/B,
Asus F3Jv
Graphs and tables of features can be read via our pdf downloads above.

Feature: How to look after your laptop battery

Although they're tough, laptop battery packs still need to be treated with care and respect  13 Nov 2006

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