The HP EliteBook 2540p Is a Highly Portable Business Machine With Few Sacrifices

A new HP laptop, the EliteBook 2540p assembles zippy components and versatile ports in a nimble case. Though HP's omission of a graphical processor slows the machine down for games and 3D software, this model possesses ample power for nearly any professional application. And the highly portable (3.38 pounds) EliteBook can transform any room into a satellite office.

Priced at $1629 (as of May 5, 2010), the EliteBook 2540p is especially noteworthy for its solid case--a clean, metal-and-plastic design that HP says can withstand 300 pounds of pressure when closed. (If you do run into problems, however, be forewarned that HP ranked last in our most recent reader survey of manufacturer reliability and service.) The laptop feels compact and manages to hold out for a solid 5 hours, 34 minutes on a single battery charge.

A 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-640LM and 4GB RAM provide the laptop's pep, helping it to a score of 102 in our WorldBench 6 test suite. The system feels powerful enough to handle Web browsing, Office apps, and virtually any productivity or content creation software. But lacking a dedicated graphics processor, it limped through our low-quality, 800-by-600-pixel Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark at 14.2 frames per second. Other 3D games are similarly unplayable. Business users might not care, but content creators may occasionally want better graphics performance than this model can deliver; even Photoshop can take advantage of a dedicated GPU.

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