HP ProBook 4510s – business class redefined
May 6, 2009 by Gary Illyes
Filed under Notebooks, iNews
Whether you’re a tech enthusiast or a businessman, you will definitely adore HP’s new ProBook S series notebooks. Even though they are the little brothers of the well known EliteBook, their price-quality ratio beats most of the HP notebooks’.
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HP Integrity NonStop NS2000 server family now available
March 16, 2009 by Gary Illyes
Filed under iNews
PALO ALTO, California — HP today announced the new, entry-level HP Integrity NonStop NS2000 server family, which delivers high performance and fault-tolerance at the lowest cost available for a multi-core Integrity NonStop system.
The NS2000 is ideal for small and midsized organizations in the healthcare, financial services and telecommunications industries, as well as customers in emerging markets. It allows organizations to cost-effectively meet the high availability and scalability of their business. Designed with the full benefits of HP NonStop technology, the NS2000 family paves the way for future growth without the worry of application compatibility.
“There is a large segment of smaller enterprise customers that tends to be priced out of the market for high-end, fault-tolerant servers,” said Jim Johnson, chief executive officer of the research company Standish Group. “For those customers, the NS2000 server offers significant value and additional choice for application availability and fault tolerance.”
The new rack-mounted NS2000 servers are simple to manage and fully leverage the power of Intel® Itanium® multi-core processors to deliver:
- Double the performance capacity of previous NonStop entry-class systems.
- 24/7 data availability and real-time access to critical business applications.
- A cost-effective development and test platform for HP Integrity NonStop BladeSystem customers. The NS2000 closely matches their production environments with a common software and I/O infrastructure.
- A target migration platform for current HP Integrity NonStop S-series customers. The NS2000 runs the same applications, offering complete investment protection by extending existing solution capabilities.
“Customers with limited IT resources are looking for cost-effective solutions that quickly and easily deliver the fault-tolerant capabilities they need to minimize risk of downtime,” said Winston Prather, general manager, NonStop, HP. “The NS2000 Integrity family delivers the performance and reliability our customers need right out of the box, at a very competitive price point.”
The HP Integrity NonStop NS2000 server family is available worldwide in a variety of configurations based on specific customer requirements. Customers have a choice of four- or eight-core hardware base bundles, 8 gigabytes (GB) or 16 GB memory per processor, as well as AC and DC powered versions.
Pricing information is available by contacting a local HP representative.
Warning: The HP EliteBook 6930 may resist more than you can
September 14, 2008 by Gary Illyes
Filed under Notebooks
Testing notebooks for me can be a pain. Often they get on the operator’s mind in no time with their short battery life, lack of drivers for specific operating systems and the slowness, lack of performance.
I always have a little fear in me when I get a new notebook to test it, how will it be, will it be just another pain or this time a magnificent thing?
The latter this time.
I got a HP Elitebook 6930, HP usually means quality in my country, but there are exceptions, too, unfortunately. The firm which borrowed me the EliteBook told me it has Vista Business preinstalled. I was quite shocked when I saw the XP boot-screen, the notebook came in a sealed box which had on its side written the specification of the notebook, it was stated that the notebook comes with Vista installed, so what happened is very weird.
OK, the first impression: the HP EliteBook 6930 is beautiful. It’s design is very clever, the screen has an anti-glare layer so it’s perfect in (almost) all the situations. My only issue is the aluminum case where you place your hands while writing, it’s frigging cold. It warms up quite fast, but till warms up, it’s very cold.
So, let’s turn the notebook on. I waited for XP to load, the battery was discharged almost completely so I thought to begin some tests before testing the autonomy of the batteries.
As usual, I loaded a HQ (720i) video. The notebook i got has an Intel GMA 4500MHD video card. These cards are not the best for viewing high quality media, because they are designed for mobility not performance. But the movie was rolling smoothly, no issues. I guess this is the result of the extremely high performance processor. This HP EliteBook’s heart is an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor which is working at 2.26 GHz, has 3MB (!) L2 cache, and is a FSB (front side bus) at 1066 MHz.
Next test till I wait the batteries to charge: playing The Elder Scrols: Oblivion. The game loaded quite fast, not as fast as on my desktop PC, but fast enough to not damage my impressions about the EliteBook 6930. Started to play, I expected a good, smooth play, I was wrong. Even though the processor could handle the game and the 2GB of DDR2 RAM working at 800 MHZ is more than enough to play, the poor quality Intel GMA video card is not designed for game-play.
I tried to search for drivers, because my last test for the Acer eMachines e510 gave some real headaches. For this one was very easy, HP has it’s driverbase made accessible for anyone, you can download the drivers for XP and versions of Vista here.
The batteries got charged, so I plugged the power-cord off. XP immediately switched to power saver mode, which i switched back to high performance immediately, and I started to write this article. I started to write it at 9 AM, now is 11:43 AM and the batteries are at 84% charge level. This is weird for me because any notebook I used would discharge in almost 3 hours and this is almost fully charged. So I started to research a bit, because this is very weird. At least for me, of course.
The first result in Google: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080908a.html
This could be the situation in my case, I called the firm which gave me the notebook, it turned out that this particular item *is* configured ultra-capacity battery.
I let the notebook sitting on the desk, with all functions (wireless, camera, etc.) turned on and waited. After 3 hours I returned to see what happened. Nothing, it was still working, charge level at 54%. Another 3 hours passed by and the charge level is still 29%. Amazing.
Now is 8PM and I’m about to finish this review. The review of the HP Elitebook 6930, an awesome choice for everyone who travels with his notebook. Gees, it lasted without issues 12 hours, without special drivers or power saver settings.
