While new portable devices make the headlines and fire people’s imagination, many still need a computer that is reliable and able to deliver when it really matters. For business organisations, reliability and security are two very important factors and the HP ProBook 6550b was built with this in mind.
HP made available to i-Tech a 15.6-inch ProBook 6550b that came with an Intel Core i5 2.4 GHz processor, Windows 7 32-bit operating system, 2 GB RAM, a 280-GB hard disk and Mobility Radeon 512 MB graphics card.
The first impression you get of this machine is that it is bulky and heavy. Since it is not a netbook and it was made with heavy duty in mind, the appearance and weight are fully justified. However it is not as heavy as it looks and can be carried around.
There are two reasons why it looks large: the 15.6-inch HD backlit screen has very good real estate and the keyboard has a numeric pad, something which had almost disappeared from laptops or you find it only in 17-inch models.
The keyboard is efficient and the numeric pad is a bonus for number crunchers at the office. Given the size of the laptop, the touchpad could have been a little larger.
In terms of performance, the i5 processor performed very well. However we found it strange that a machine intended for small businesses and with such a good processor could only sport 2 GB of RAM. Even home users today would prefer 4 GB of RAM, and this is even stranger when you consider that the ProBook 6550b can support up to 8 GB of RAM on Windows 7 64-bit.
A similar case can be made for the hard disk. It’s a fast 7200 RPM but the 280 GB capacity in our review model looked small. Even though external storage is cheap, a bigger internal hard disk would have been nice, given the fact that this laptop is HD capable and video files take a lot of space.
The ProBook 6550b is fantastic in terms of connectivity. It’s one of the few laptops we saw around that has in-built mobile broadband, which means you don’t need an external internet key to connect to 3G internet. The WLAN card is good and it also has a GPS function for location services.
Like all HP notebooks this model comes with a host of HP software for management and security. We had the HP Protection Tools that complement that biometric fingerprint reader, HP Communication Manager, and other software on a trial basis. To sum up, the HP ProBook 6550b is a reliable machine and should not let professional users down.