The HP Compaq 6730b is a reasonable but uninteresting business notebook. Unfortunately the competition — and even HP — are offering much better systems at a comparative or lower price.

Design
Business notebooks are generally a bland, black on gray affair. But even on this scale, HP manage to made their mid-line business notebooks look bland. Gray and black on the outside, gray and black on the inside, the HP Compaq 6730b just screams "large corporate rollout for an accounting firm".

Continuing with this theme, this is a no-nonsense notebook. The 15.4-inch matte display is clear, and matte displays are always a plus because they are less reflective. The display has a native resolution of 1280x800, which is low for a display of this size.

The keyboard is comfortable and functional, while the large trackpad features two paddle-like buttons that are clearly designed to last. Between them is a fingerprint reader. One notable feature is the glossy ribbon which sits just below the display, giving you access to a series of touch screen buttons for volume, disabling wireless, presentation setting and the HP Help Centre. Encouragingly, the HP Help Centre is useful, providing shortcuts to information including a system manual and system specifications.

Port options on the 6730b are fairly standard. There is no HDMI or DVI, video out is provided by S-video and VGA ports. There is also no eSATA or USB charging when the laptop is switched off, but HP gets points for the FireWire port. The system features four USB ports, but unfortunately, the USB ports on the right in particular are crammed so close together you might find it hard to fit a USB device into both simultaneously.

There are also a couple of legacy ports, in the form of a serial port on the right and an RJ-11 port, which connects to the modem, on the back. The 6730 features both an express card 54 slot for expansion and a media card slot.

At 2.7kg the 6730b is a mid-weight laptop, we wouldn't recommend it for travellers, but it's not as unwieldy as a desktop replacement.

Features
The internals of the 6730b are an unexciting mix of standard business parts. Our review system came with an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4GHz) and 2GB of RAM. On the plus side the system is Centrino 2 certified, meaning a/b/g and draft-N wireless as standard, better integrated graphics and power management. We use PCMark05 to benchmark notebooks, and this one gave a middle of the range score of 4658.

Our system came running 32-bit Windows Vista Business, and we were disappointed to see that there is no 64-bit Windows Vista available as a pre-install. However, Windows XP SP3 is available as a downgrade.

Our 6730b came with a 250GB SATA II 5400 RPM drive. That's the maximum available on this line, the cheaper model has a 160GB HDD.

Graphics on our system was provided by an integrated Intel GM45 graphics chipset, which forms part of the Centrino 2 platform. This should be fine for office applications, but is not a graphics performer, yielding a 3DMark06 score of 745. There is no discrete graphics card available with these systems, so those looking for graphics capabilities should look to a different system.

In order to test battery life, we set screen brightness to 50 per cent, turned off the sound and then played a DVD. This yielded a poor score of one hour and 45 minutes (105 minutes). We generally hope for at least 2 hours. The battery on the 6730 is 55Whr.

The level of pre-installed trial software wasn't too bad for a business laptop. Trial software included MS Office 2007, while full software included Roxio DVD Creator for business, AOL toolbar, PDF Complete and Adobe Flash Player.

Verdict
The 6730b system we were sent comes in at AU$1900, although the base model is available for AU$1500. We're not thrilled by this pricing. Lenovo's ThinkPad SL500 comes in at the same price, and has more port options, a discrete graphics card, better battery life and a higher resolution display. Dell's base model of the Latitude E6500 comes in cheaper, and is similarly a much more advanced machine.

Otherwise you might look to a similarly configured Dell Vostro 1510, which currently comes in $300 dollars cheaper (AU$1600), but includes twice the RAM and a discrete Nvidia graphics card, and can also be customised. Ouch.

Fujitsu's offering is similarly overpriced, but includes decent battery life, even while once again squeezing in a discrete graphics card.

If you're specifically after a HP notebook, you're much better off investing in the higher end EliteBook range, which is a much better machine for only AU$100 more.