It’s official. I never thought this day would come. When I received my new HP ProBook 4730s a couple of weeks back my whole world changed. I became less stressed, grew three inches taller and lost 20 pounds. Well, maybe not, but I did grow less stressed.
Okay…some history first.. I was a devoted ThinkPad user. My laptop is my life and I knew my ThinkPad inside out… right down to manually removing Trojans, cleaning up and repairing registries and a bare metal restore, when needed.
After being a ThinkPad and PC user for my entire life, I wanted to give Apple a try. I can’t really explain why. Perhaps I got caught in a weak moment where I felt I needed change. Perhaps my friends were too convincing and could not stop raving about how great the Macbook Pro was. They even offered to hold my hand through the transition and send me their entire collection of applications. This is when my research began.
I base a lot of my purchases on Consumer Reports. I came across the June 2011 consumer report that ranked the HP “slightly” below the MacBook Pro. However, there were some specification and feature differences in favor of the HP that convinced me to take a closer look at their laptop offerings. Oh yes, by the way, the HP came in $1200.00 less as compared to the MacBook.
Now impressed by HP’s Consumer Reports review, I decided to take a look at an even higher performing model: The HP ProBook 4730s. After reading dozens of rave reviews on the 4730s vs. the MacBook Pro I decided to make the HP ProBook 4730s my new laptop. A bit about the 4730:
The HP ProBook 4730s is a professional laptop with a 17.3-inch widescreen display, making it a full-sized portable platform powered by state-of-the-art technology. The HP ProBook 4730s is powered by a second generation Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM 2.0GHz quad-core processor mated to 8GB ultra-fast DDR3 memory. So far so good! The 4730s comes with a 750GB hard drive and Blu-ray Burner optical drive, USB 2.0, HDMI, and audio input/output ports for your various peripherals. Connectivity options include a Gigabit LAN, 802.11b/g/n wireless and Bluetooth built in.
The 4730s has a brushed metal exterior; the metal texture creates a professional look and feel. As far as keyboard and touchpad goes, the 4730s has got it pretty much spot on. The laptop’s isolated, Chiclet-styled keys are very well laid out and a treat to type on. The keyboard also has a dedicated number pad on the right. The brushed palm rest is raised, nice and wide, great to park my wrists on while typing. The touchpad is finely textured and very responsive. The touchpad is gesture-enabled for rotating images, zooming in, pan out, and scrolling through web pages – and all the gestures work just fine.
The performance of the 4730s is just stunning. I use it day and night and have no problems at all. I can open as many windows as I want and it never lets me down. If you really want a well performing laptop you can’t go wrong with the 4730s!
These are just some of the reasons I fell for my laptop.
I completely agree. I have a 4420s Pro book and I freaking love it! I also was an IBM Think pad addict. I had an R51 and maxed it out. I then moved onto a Dell Inspiron 6000 and eventually knew that one in and out and maxed it out. Now I got very lucky. Someone I know bought this 4420s pro book and eventually after the warranty expired they had it loaded with virus’s and someone stepped on it while it was closed and destroyed the LCD screen!!! Knowing it was a good laptop (secretly jealous of how they treated there awesome laptop) I offered to buy it. The dude eventually sold it to me for $50.00!!! NO JOKE! I bought a new screen, $88.00 off eBay OEM screen, same one that was in it. I replaced the screen (which was simple with the downloadable manual from HP. Once the screen was working I opened it up and put 2 4GB ram sticks in place of one single 2gb ram stick. Cleaned it out completely with duster. Wiped the hard drive with disk sanitizer (kind of dumb but I did it because the drive was full of virus’s) then loaded a brand new Windows Ultimate 64 bit operating system. Downloaded the HP security stuff I wanted to use, like facial recognition, didn’t add all the other bloatware I hear they come with an BAMMMM!! For $50.00 plus the screen $88.00 and the 8gb of ram ($42.00) I have an awesome HP PROBOOK 4420s ENERGY STAR EDITION Laptop that is faster than brand spanking new dell’s and other laptops I’ve compared it to. Yes it was a lot of work fixing the laptop and installing all the software but it was like getting to rebuild a $4,000 laptop for less then $200.00!!! I wouldn’t trade this HP Probook running Windows Ultimate loaded with tons of great software like photoshop etc for an APPLE COMPUTER TOWER BRAND NEW OUT OF THE BOX!!! The security system alone on these HP business laptops is unbelievable with LO JACK and actual chips on the motherboard that hold the BIOS password so if anyone ever steals it, IT WILL BE USELESS, and as soon as they plug it in and it gets a signal it will tell me where the laptop is and snap a picture with the camera to show there mug!!!