HP Compaq nx7300 review

HP’s Compaq nx7300 is the cheapest laptop this month, priced at just £458, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best value of the group. For a start, it’s significantly underpowered, with its old 1.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 being outperformed by almost all of its rivals, even the semi-rugged Panasonic. Its overall score of 0.71 doesn’t mean it’s sluggish, but it doesn’t let Windows Vista Business race along at a brisk pace.

But more importantly in this Labs, it was the only laptop not to reach the four-hour mark for light-use battery life. Admittedly, it fell only six minutes short, but it’s still a disappointment when its competitors with power-guzzling graphics chips comfortably surpassed four hours.

The nx7300 isn’t one of the most portable of the group, either. It weighs 2.7kg and is fairly bulky, but the plus side to this is the sturdy build quality throughout. The keyboard is well laid out and has full-sized keys, and we like the hardware controls for volume and Wi-Fi (Bluetooth is controlled via software).

The other bonus is the 15.4in TFT. Although it has the same 1,280 x 800 resolution as most contenders this month, the extra size makes for less squinting at finer details. Colours lack vibrancy compared to the glossy screens, but it’s adequate for getting work done, and the speakers are far and away the best on test: loud, rich and a pleasure to listen to next to some of the underpowered, tinny offerings.

But the highlights end there, as the rest of the nx7300 is strictly what you’d expect from a £458 notebook. The hard disk is small at 80GB and the lack of a card reader and Gigabit Ethernet port are all obvious corners cut. And compared to the fantastic styling of its consumer rivals, the nx7300 looks uninspired and dull. There’s no fingerprint reader or TPM chip, but the single year of collect-and-return warranty cover is what we’d expect at this price.

Overall, if your budget is limited, the HP is a reasonable choice. But judged on battery life, it falls well short of the standard set by the Evesham, which costs just £91 more and lasts nearly eight hours.