Like any small business owner, HP's B Series ProBook laptops are excellent multitaskers. These versatile machines offer a fine balance of several business-laptop staples: attractive (yet professional) designs, moderate prices, and solid performance. That's a combination any cash-strapped business would appreciate.
Keeping that ratio of price to performance right is a never-ending job, though. We reviewed the budget-model ProBook 6465b, which tries to meet its price and performance goals by employing a second-generation AMD A Series processor. Part of the AMD Fusion line, the A Series chips, code-named "Llano" during their development, feature advanced graphics acceleration right on the chip die. They are designed to keep system costs low and power consumption down.
AMD’s A Series chips are designed to compete with Intel’s Core Series processors. In our tests, however, especially when compared with Intel's 2011-generation "Sandy Bridge" efforts, the A Series chips don’t quite measure up in general application performance. (The A Series chips' graphics performance is more promising, but of less interest to most business buyers.) Small-business owners will have to decide which is more important: keeping to a tight budget, or spending a bit more for extra performance with everyday applications.
The $679 ProBook 6465b we tested is the least-expensive preconfigured model HP offers. Our test unit used the AMD A4-3310MX processor, which is a dual-core chip with a 2.1GHz base clock speed. It's one of the lower-end chips in the A Series to date. That core silicon was backed by 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive.
That may sound like a recipe for a ho-hum budget machine, but where the ProBooks really seal the deal is in the hardware and software extras that HP includes. Many of them are catnip for business users and emphasize security: a spill-resistant keyboard, a fingerprint reader, a Smart Card slot, and HP's ProtectTools suite. The low price on our ProBook test unit kept some higher-end features, including a backlit keyboard and USB 3.0, out of the picture. Still, buyers of this model get the luxury of an internal optical drive and plenty of ports.
You do get a lot in this machine for $679, but the big question is whether the performance is quite good enough for your or your employees' day-to-day needs. More on that in a bit.
The ProBook 6465b's design will be familiar to anyone who's seen the company's recent ProBook or EliteBook models. It has the same executive-chic appeal of the HP EliteBook 2560p we tested, but without the higher price. The boxy chassis looks and feels sturdy and rugged. At the same time, the overall effect is almost elegant, thanks to the dark aluminum lid. Plus, the lid's color and material rebuff fingerprint smudges.
The charcoal-colored aluminum lid keeps fingerprint smudges (mostly) in check.
At 1.3 inches thick, the ProBook 6465b isn't sleek, but the taper on the bottom minimizes the size a bit. HP could have designed the machine a bit thinner, though. (Replacing the tray-loading optical drive with a slot-loading model might have shaved a few extra millimeters off this machine's profile, though it would have boosted the price, too.) The 13.3x9.1-inch footprint of the chassis isn't as compact as it could be, either. This laptop will fit into bags and briefcases made for the average 13-inch-screened laptop just fine, but the 5.3-pound weight may discourage you from taking it everywhere.
As with the ProBook 5330M and the EliteBook 2560p, the ProBook 6465b has a spill-resistant, Chiclet-style keyboard that offers comfortable travel and decent tactile feedback. We had one layout quibble: It's too easy to hit the Home key by accident when reaching for the Backspace key, since the latter key is smaller than on most laptop keyboards. Also, the lack of a keyboard backlight made typing in low-light situations more difficult, especially with the deck's dark palette. Backlighting isn't a given in any machine at this price, but bear this in mind if you'll compute a lot in the dark.
Overall, the Chiclet-style keyboard is comfortable.
Above the keyboard is a set of three quick-access/status-indicator buttons: a wireless on/off toggle, the QuickWeb button, and a mute toggle. Pressing the QuickWeb button with the laptop powered off or in hibernation mode launches an instant-on OS that includes a Web browser, Skype, and a few other quick-access apps. (This is a "pre-boot" environment that launches instead of, and much faster than, Windows.) The QuickWeb feature proves useful if you need to check e-mail, send a short message, or double-check an appointment's time and location. That said, for many business users, a smartphone would likely serve the same purpose.
The wide touch pad offers plenty of space for ranging your cursor across the screen in a single finger swipe. In our use of the pad throughout this review, the smooth surface was responsive and friction-free under our fingers. The pad also supports multi-finger gesture input (a.k.a. "multi-touch" commands). The multitouch gestures took time to get used to, though, and they weren't as easy to execute on this touch pad as they should be. Two-finger scrolling, for example, worked only when our fingers were a particular width apart.
The four mouse buttons (there's a pair above the touch pad, and another below) don't offer strong tactile feedback, but neither are they stiff or hard to use. They're all an adequate size, but the two buttons on the bottom would be better if they extended closer to the front edge of the laptop, to make them easier for fingers to find.
The pair of buttons above the touch pad are for use with the pointing stick at the center of the keyboard, which has a divot in its surface to guide your fingertip. This stick is not as precise as the signature ones found on Lenovo's ThinkPad models, however. Still, for typists who prefer not to remove their hands from the keyboard to move the cursor, it's nice to have.
Business users tend to appreciate dual pointing devices. Here, you get a pointing stick and a touch pad, each with its own set of mouse buttons.
A better-than-expected array of ports and slots lines the sides and back of the ProBook 6465b. Along the left side are the tray for the DVD burner, plus a Smart Card reader, two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, and an SD/MultiMediaCard flash-memory slot. The memory-card slot is in a bad spot, though, tucked under the two USB ports; we had to lift the laptop to reach this slot when we had a flash drive plugged in. To the left of the battery, on the back edge, are Ethernet, VGA-out, and old-school modem ports. Along the right edge are a DisplayPort video output, another USB 2.0 port, a combo eSATA/USB 2.0 port, headphone and mic jacks, and a security-cable lockdown slot.
Ports rarely live on the back edge of notebooks anymore, but you’ll find ones for Ethernet, VGA, and a modem here.
The lack of USB 3.0 ports is a bit of a disappointment, especially for a business machine. The eSATA connector is your one option on this machine for faster-than-USB 2.0 transfers, but it's only useful if you have compatible peripherals.
The left edge, with the DVD±RW drive, a Smart Card reader, two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, and an SD-card slot. We weren’t keen on the flash-card slot being below the USB ports.
One thing we did appreciate: HP made getting into the guts of the ProBook 6465b very easy. After removing the battery, all you need to do is push a button (right next to the battery lock) to pop off a bottom panel to access the SO-DIMM memory banks and the Wi-Fi card. Changing out the hard drive is only a little more complicated; you will need to remove a couple of screws.
Getting inside this laptop's chassis was a snap. You need a screwdriver only if you’re swapping out the hard drive.
The 14-inch screen on our review unit featured a standard 1,366x768 native resolution. Buyers can upgrade that to a high-definition 1,600x900-resolution display that will take better advantage of the screen space. As befits a business machine, the LCD has a matte finish that cuts down on reflectivity under bright lights and sunlight. In the case of this screen, though, it only works if you keep the brightness cranked up to 100 percent. Dial it down to conserve battery life, and you'll lose much of this advantage.
Also, the matte finish on the screen interfered with how colors looked. In our testing, bright colors appeared washed out, and dark tones and shadows were too dark. The laptop has a brightness auto-adjust feature, and that didn't help matters; it tended to make the screen too dark when it detected dark colors dominating the screen.
Also, whether the coating was to blame, we're not sure, but we noted narrow horizontal (side-to-side) viewing angles with this screen. You'll want to view this display from as close to center as possible, so in practice only two people can share this screen comfortably. Shift your line of sight far enough off center, and you'll encounter color distortion.
The audio quality on this machine also didn't overly impress. This ProBook comes equipped with an SRS Premium Sound driver, but the tiny speaker just under the front-left edge doesn't give it much to work with. For watching Netflix or listening to streaming music, you'll want to use headphones or an external speaker.
The HD Webcam did a better job, delivering images without much noise or blur, and rendering colors with fair accuracy. We tested it informally, video-chatting on Skype and ooVoo with buddies, who told us that our skin tone and shirt colors looked good on the receiving end. They also praised the quality of the audio they heard from our end; that's thanks to the dual microphones HP incorporated into this machine. The Webcam can record video at up to 720p.
The right edge: Here you’ll find a DisplayPort connector, another USB 2.0 port, a combo eSATA/USB 2.0 port, headphone and mic jacks, and a Kensington-lock slot.
It’s good that the Webcam captures accurate images, because the camera allows users to take advantage of one of HP’s better security features on this machine: logging in via face-recognition. This is a fairly common feature on enterprise-focused laptops, but HP enhances the feature here: You get the ability to pair recognition with the presence of a specified Bluetooth device, such as a smartphone. If the device isn’t present, the laptop won’t automatically log on. (If you lose the device, you can still log on using security questions handled by HP's SpareKey utility.)
You can also log on with the fingerprint reader, which sits on the lower right side of the deck on ProBook B models you configure yourself. And if you really want to maximize security, you can use HP's ProtectTools console to require more than one login method (say, facial recognition plus a password, or a fingerprint read plus insertion of a Smart Card).
HP’s ProtectTools suite gives you easy access to the ProBook's panoply of security features.
Other security features on this machine include drive encryption, a pre-bootup password check (you'll have to enter the word before Windows will start), file- and disk-sanitizing utilities, a privacy manager, and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2 embedded security chip to encrypt your data. Your business may not use (or even understand why it needs) all or most of these, but this is a premium selection of features for those who can make use of them.
Another handy enhancement anyone can use is HP Power Assistant. It can help even the most timid or reluctant users to tweak power settings exactly to their liking and extend the battery life. The options go beyond what Windows offers, and the utility can even monitor power usage on the laptop and create detailed reports. In Power Assistant, you can also tweak the settings for the screen's ambient-light sensor, or turn it off completely.
In addition to Broadcom’s wireless-N Wi-Fi adapter, which came in our test unit, buyers can configure the ProBook 6465b with mobile-broadband connectivity—EV-DO/HSPA or HSPA+—with service from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. Overall, the connectivity and security options and features are first-rate.
The A Series "accelerated processing units" (or APUs, AMD's term for its combined CPU/graphics chips) are AMD’s ostensible answer to Intel’s Core i3, i5, and i7 processors. Similar to the lower-powered E-Series APUs used in the HP Pavilion dm1, the graphics cores are integrated right into the processor die, so the APU can deliver reasonable performance without hogging power and generating lots of heat.
The entry-level-model ProBook 6465b we tested, as we mentioned earlier, used the AMD A4-3310MX chip, which is a two-core chip with on-chip graphics AMD that dubs the Radeon HD 6480G. The competition in the same price range as this laptop is mostly made up of budget small-business-oriented notebooks using Intel’s Sandy Bridge Core i5 processors. Two examples we've tested are the 13.3-inch Dell Vostro 3350 (based on the 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-2410M) and HP’s own 13.3-inch ProBook 5330M (which used a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-2520M). Both of those systems came with 4GB of RAM, like our test ProBook 6465b one did.
The ProBook 6465b trailed a good distance behind the competition on tests that measure overall performance. On PCMark Vantage, which tests overall system speed with common productivity apps, the ProBook 6465b’s score of 4,493 was well below the average score of 5,969 for the entire thin-and-light-laptop category. (That includes all such machines we've tested since January 2010.) Both the Dell Vostro 3350 and HP ProBook 5330M trounced it on this test, scoring 6,939 and 7,333, respectively. Likewise, the ProBook 6465b’s 7,142 score on our 64-bit Cinebench 10 test, which measures raw CPU muscle and taxes all the cores of the CPU, also lagged behind the Vostro 3350 (9,487), the ProBook 5330M (10,357), and the 7,973 category average.
We then moved to media-file-conversion tests, where things perked up—a little. On our iTunes Conversion Test, in which we convert 11 MP3 test files to AAC format, the ProBook 6465b did the job in 4 minutes and 11 seconds (4:11)—slower than the average (3:48), but not by too much. On our other conversion test, Windows Media Encoder, in which we transcode a 3-minute-and-15-second video clip, the ProBook 6465b got closer to the category average (4:58), converting our test file in 5:02.
We then spent some time multitasking. We opened almost two dozen tabs across Firefox 6 and Chrome, surfing a mixture of simple text and image pages and more intense Flash-based pages and games. Adding to this, we switched between Photoshop CS5, Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition, and W...
Source:
