HP ProBook 4411s - Budget Business Class

P For Professionals

If you find HP's enterprise level EliteBook range a wee bit too daunting in price but loved the overall design and build compared to the more consumer oriented Pavilion series, then HP's newest series of ProBooks would be the ideal alternative to look out for. After all, HP's current strategy is to target the ProBook at small and medium businesses at an affordable price point lower then their EliteBook series of notebooks. As a side benefit, it also offers the casual consumer interested in the functional no-nonsense EliteBook design that is now within their reach.

Indeed, you'll find plenty of similarities in the design of the ProBook and the EliteBook series; after all, both are business-class notebooks but that said, the ProBooks do scale down somewhat on some of the options offered on the EliteBook series. Most noticeably, they differ in the type of material used in the construction of the notebook. We could feel the difference on our review unit of the HP ProBook 4411s, as it sported a plastic build instead of the magnesium alloy used on the EliteBook notebooks. The ProBook also isn't up to the military grade toughness of the EliteBooks, but it does have protection for your hard disk drives in the form of HP's 3D DriveGuard, which parks the hard drive head safely if it detects sudden freefalling motions (i.e. your notebook goes crashing onto the floor).

So aside from the build quality, HP has included some of the features found on the EliteBook series onto the ProBooks like the HP QuickLook2, a feature that boots the system into a shell where you can view your emails without loading the Windows operating system and a HP SpareKey feature for accessing your system when you forget your passwords. Sounds like an impressive package from HP for a budget business notebook, but what about its hardware innards?

E for Exterior

As mentioned earlier, because the ProBook 4411s is a more affordable range from HP, it sports a less sturdy build made of plastic as opposed to the magnesium chassis of the EliteBook range. Despite that, the notebook feels reassuringly solid in our usage and we felt comforted by its thick chunky solid presence. If it's a slim and light notebook you're looking for, well this isn't it, but if you're like us, you will appreciate the build for its dependable brick-like presence.

Apart from its build, there's also the glorious merlot color scheme that does its best to catch your attention. Business notebooks tend to be a drab formal affair, so it's always nice to see a little touch of flair in the choice of color for the ProBook 4411s. Opening up the notebook, you'll find that the color scheme extends downwards to the speakers and palm rest, but the area around the chiclet keyboard comes clad in gloss black. More gloss awaits you around the bezel of the screen, though the matte screen escapes the same treatment.

Just above the keyboard area, you'll find a large power button and located next to it, the QuickLook2 button that boots the system into HP's QuickLook 2 shell. QuickLook 2 gives you speedy access to view your calendars, emails, appointments without booting into Windows. It currently works with Microsoft Outlook and is basically a cached version of your actual data. Note however that you can't create or reply emails as the QuickLook 2 environment is purely for a quick check on your schedule.

The chiclet keyboard was easy to type on, though we could detect very noticeable flex on the keyboard itself. The keys are also lacking in HP's Durakeys technology, but we don't expect that to be an issue for most casual users. We do however love the feel and responsiveness of the trackpad. The buttons of the trackpad felt a bit strange with their odd tilting angle; it made clicking the buttons slightly difficult. You may find it different, but we didn't quite like our experience with the trackpad.

Lastly, audio quality sounded decent enough for presentations in a closed environment, but don't expect anything more. The HP ProBook 4411s isn't an entertainment class notebook anyway, so don't get any wrong ideas about the machine's proposition.

I for Inner Hardware

By now you should have a good look and feel of the HP ProBook 4411s, so it's time to take a look at its inner specifications. This machine uses an Intel Core 2 Duo T6570 (2.1GHz) which should be decent enough for most applications and comes equipped with 3GB of DDR2 RAM. For its graphics subsystem, it uses a discrete solution in the form of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 with 512MB video memory. It's not gaming class, but it should do fine rendering HD clips fine on the 14-inch screen. Rounding things up is a 500GB hard drive from Toshiba, the MK5055GSX 5400RPM drive that should provide more than adequate storage space.

Notebook Comparisons

With notebooks being the way they are, it's almost impossible to get a direct comparison, though we've used the slightly more expensive and portable Samsung X460 in a direct comparison to see how the affordable HP ProBook 4411s holds up. We've also managed to obtain limited benchmark scores on a HP EliteBook 6930p to throw in for further comparison.

Battery Performance and Portability Index

If you're a business road warrior thinking of getting the HP ProBook 4411s and wondering if it will last you the distance, well fret not, we've put it to our usual battery testing to see if it can hold enough of a charge. Since it came packed with a 6-cell Li-Ion battery by default, we expected it fair well and we weren't disappointed. Lasting a cool 2 hours 34 minutes on our DVD looping test, the unit should get you going places and will last long enough without a charge to nail down that very important presentation.

Power consumption wise, the unit does achieve a very respectable 18.29 watts even though the 4411s' processor is rated at a higher TDP (35W compared to the X460's processor which is rated for just 25W). This is probably due to better optimization in the system hardware, but the difference between both systems' scores is quite close.

Lastly, putting the battery life, weight and dimensions together, we found that the HP notebook does quite reasonably in our Portability Index test with its score of 0.468. Sure it's not as portable compared to the other notebooks due to its size and weight, but it's still a very good score seeing as how we were expecting a much lower score to emerge prior to our calculations.

Performance Benchmarking

Loading up our three trusty benchmarks, PCMark05, PCMark Vantage and 3DMark06, we evaluated the performance of the HP ProBook 4411s. As mentioned on the previous page, we have limited scores from the HP EliteBook 6930p, so some of the graphs may be missing out on results from that unit. Note that the scores of the 6930p are for reference only as the units don't really compare in terms of specifications due to the EliteBook having a much better processor and using an SSD drive.

Moving on, it's obvious that given the almost similar clockspeed of the HP ProBook 4411s and the Samsung X460, the scores don't really differ much even with the slightly larger cache that the X460's Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 has. Both units scored similar results with the HP unit actually just edging out the Samsung machine in the CPU test scores by just a little bit. The HDD scores show much better results in both the PCMark05 and Vantage tests.

Lastly in 3DMark06, we have the ATI Radeon HD 4330 beating out the NVIDIA GeForce 9200M GS with a score of 3070 to 2367. The EliteBook uses an integrated Intel GMA, and it's quite obvious that even a speedy SSD doesn't help much in the 3D benchmarks. As you can clearly see, judging by these results, it's hard not to be impressed so far by the performance of the HP machine despite its billing as a budget machine. Of course, even though our comparisons are pitting two 14-inch notebooks, they are of very different classes (with the Samsung belonging to the Ultrathin, or Thin and Light segment). The HP unit however, is more of a mainstream variant.

Book Me One!

To be honest, we had some initial misgivings about the HP ProBook line - a budget business notebook may make sense financially, but how will it actually hold up for actual business usage? Make it too cheap and you'll find folks lining up to buy the unit but if it doesn't deliver the performance they require, you end up with very dissatisfied customers. HP seems to have managed to find the right balance between performance and budget in the ProBook 4411s, and as our test shows, it's actually pretty impressive.

For the business users, there are the sweeteners in the form of additional enterprise level software like the Disk Sanitizer tool and HP QuickLook 2. For the casual consumer, there's always the performance offered by the machine and its more than adequate hardware to support the needs of students and casual users. But the real deal breaker is the actual retail price of the unit, because at S$1799, it's a pretty affordable machine for what it can do. To further sweeten the deal, HP is currently offering the unit at a discounted price of S$1599 till the middle of September, which makes this an even better deal more than ever for consumers and businesses alike.

HP looks to have found just the right pitch for the new ProBook range - it's angled right between the higher end enterprise EliteBook range and the bling appeal of its consumer Pavilion line while carrying selective traits of both segments. So if you are on the look out for a notebook to get and are none too fussy about the HP's ProBook 4411s' bulky build and weight, then do give this notebook a shot. It's well designed and has a nice finish with just the right touch of attractiveness with none of the usual glossy overdose in the wrong places.

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