HP EliteBook W Series review

HP’s Workstation line provides all the power and processing speed of a desktop and the portability of a laptop on one single EliteBook. These are designed for multimedia purposes.

Coming with admirable processors, their graphics chipset is what sets them apart from business notebooks. It is the combination of these two chips that places them beyond your casual use PCs or gaming notebooks.

The major difference between the 8740w and the 8540w is that the latter has a larger memory but smaller screen; they each share such specs as processors, connectivity and expandability.

What we like best

One of the most impressive features of these systems is that with the docking station, they can interact with five screens from just the one graphics card. A truly handy feature if you need a lot of information on screen.

The USB 3.0 port is fast replacing the 2.0, and having such ports on this notebook will make sure you are ahead of the technology curve. In keeping with this, HP has enabled the W Series to use either the well established i5 processor or the powerhouse i7.

You can also make the difficult choice between the ATI or NVIDIA graphics chipsets, which function admirably on the LED QUXGA+ displays.

What we like least

The optical drive supports Blu-ray recording but it cannot play Blu-ray movies which is an oddity. The drive is not particularly quiet either.

One weakness of the W Series is the touchpad which does not support multi-touch technology and is rather small and insensitive.