A few months back we told you about the ProBook 4510s, HP’s all-new 15.6-inch notebook aimed at business users who need just the essentials at a good price. The newest member of the ProBook family is the 4710s, a 17.3-inch desktop replacement model that also delivers a good mix of features and performance for an attractive $1,099. Unfortunately, some questionable design and component decisions—no doubt aimed at keeping the price down—hold it back.
The HP ProBook 4710s battery is a low-priced 17-inch business notebook designed to provide businesses with a good desktop replacement notebook without breaking the bank. If your company wants the HP Elitebook 8730w but has a tight budget, the ProBook 4710s might be a good alternative at a starting price of just $899. Is this budget-priced notebook as good as it sounds? Keep reading to find out.
Key Specs
With the exception of screen size, the 4710s is identical to the 4510s. It, too, has a glossy, fingerprint-prone black lid, with an interior whose textures include a glossy keyboard deck, a satin palm rest; and the speaker strip lines the top of the keyboard. Because the bezel is thin, it’s easy to focus instead on the bright 16:9 display. As an added touch, the power and QuickLook 2 buttons and LED lights all glow turquoise blue, which also keeps the design interesting. At 6.6 pounds, the ProBook is light for a desktop replacement, and, indeed, we had no problem shuttling it around the office.
The ProBook 4710s keyboard fits a notebook of this size, in that it's mostly quite large, with a deliberately huge space bar row (including CTRL, the function key and Windows key), which we found mostly pleasant to type with. The only real oddity here is that despite the amount of space on offer — which includes allowing a full number pad — the cursor keys are oddly tiny. They're not impossible to hit, but they're solidly out of scale to the rest of the keyboard.
The ProBook 4710s battery performed well in our standard performance tests, racking up a score of 2854 in 3DMark and 5308 in PCMark. As a working machine then, the ProBook 4710s should work quite hard, something that's backed up by its battery life. We can't imagine too many scenarios where you're going to want to lug the ProBook 4710s around too much, at least for the sake of your shoulders, but if you do, the increased size of this laptop does extend to the battery. With an eight-cell battery on board, the ProBook 4710s managed a very healthy three hours and 16 minutes in our DVD playback test with screen brightness at full whack. Considering how much screen it's got to run doing that, it's a very pleasing figure indeed.
This laptop impresses when it comes to gaming and 3D performance. It's not as powerful as the Acer, but its ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics card offers enough performance to play games and run graphic-intensive programs.
The keyboard features a design where each key protrudes through an individual hole in the chassis (sometimes known as chiclet keys). There's more space between each key as a result, making it easier to type at speed without mistakes. It's a comfortable board, but it's also one of the noisiest, and there are no dedicated buttons for controlling your media files.
The HP Probook offers a base connectivity including all important interfaces. Among others it offers four USB-2.0 ports, a VGA-out, and an HDMI-interface for all-digital video and audio transmission.
In case you need further connectivity, HP also offers a USB docking station for the Probook 4710s. E.g., the compatible HP USB-2.0 docking station (FQ834ET) features a Kensington security slot, audio-in, audio-out, LAN (RJ45), a VGA-out and a DVI-D port for connecting an external screen. However, it does only support a single external display. Some users might miss sleep-and-charge support via USB. This would allow to charge mobile devices by connecting it to a USB-port of the turned-off laptop.
The 4710s has the typical system protections you’d expect from a HP System, spill resistant, HDD 3D DriveGuard, Disk Sanitizer in the event you need to wipe the drive and HP ProtectTools which will help you protect your sensitive information and manage passwords.
While HP says the 4710s is “Designed for small business professionals who want a stylish, affordable, 17.3-inch diagonal notebook with enhanced graphics, separate numeric keypad and a very large display to work on big documents and spreadsheets” I wouldn’t be surprised if some of HPs consumers bought one for themselves.
Overall the 4710s is a hell of a system for small business professionals to corporate executives and is just simply a great machine for any professional on the go.
The 4710s features the Intel Core 2 Duo processor, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 512MB dedicated video card, up to 8GB of DDR2 memory, up to 500GB of hard drive space, and a DVD burner or Blu-Ray Combo drive, depending on model.
The 17.3-inch LED-backlit display has a resolution of 1600 x 900 pixels and a 16:9 aspect ratio.
The battery for HP ProBook 4710s also sports a keyboard with a separate numeric keypad, an optional 2MP web camera, stereo speakers and an integrated microphone, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless, a Gigabit Ethernet LAN port, Bluetooth, optional 56k modem, VGA and HDMI outputs, four USB ports, an ExpressCard slot, and a media card reader. The laptop starts at around 6.8 pounds and runs Windows Vista.
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