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I recently bought myself an HP/Compaq nx6110 notebook, model name EK106ES. Beneath its consumer series Pressario, HP also sells a superior quality business notebook series with the name prefix "nx...". Those used to be more robust, built with stability in mind. They have fewer release cycles than their consumer pendants which is why they are more balanced concerning their heat management. Their focus is on robustness, mechanically and technically speaking, for they prefer ac-cu time to the latest graphics card. You will have to pay for these advantages, of course. Let's see, whether the HP nx6110 is indeed a business laptop in every sense.
What did I expect from my notebook? I knew I had to go for a business device in order to satisfy my needs as far as mechanic properties are concerned. I expected fairly mobile a machine, so its display should not be bigger than 15 inch max., and weight considerably less than 3 kg. I wanted a keyboard that lies straight on the surface and can manage even higher pressure without yielding. Intel's Pentium M mobility technology is well-known for its flawless, power saving frequency scaling. Must haves are also WLAN as well as much of RAM. Linux compatibility should be given which puts the nx6110 into pole position, because HP has a special Linux edition of those avaiblable.
Regarding design, HP is geared to former IBM notebooks. The HP nx6110's straightforward black design makes for an elegant business appearance. The obviously rock-solid quality of the used materials and its fine workmanship further improve its good mechanical characteristics.
It is very quiet, because it only rarely switches its fan on when performing highly CPU intensive tasks. The built in broadcom WLAN card reaches excellent a connection quality to my Belkin that works fluently even through concrete walls. A DVD burner provides for the ability of creating on-disc backups. The nx6110 lacks older ports such as RS 232 or Parallel Port (which are still of importance in some technical fields). It has a fireware gateway, instead. A 56k modem is integrated on the left side, as well as a 100 Mbit Ethernet interface. With the built-in VGA port you can connect to external monitors and video beamers. Some might find only two usb ports too less. If you don't need more when you are mobile and can't carry an external USB hub with you, it's not a problem, though.
The display is surely the HP's weakest point, for it is only standard. With an excellent resolution of 1400x1050 pixels at 15 inch I have much of space for my graphical applications. The display could be brighter, though. With about 170cd per cm², the display's brightness is still suited for DVD playback and photo editing, anyway. In contrast to most of the consumer laptops it has a non-reflecting surface, so that you won't see yourself mirrored in the LCD. The picture on the left documents the still acceptable perspective angle dependency of the nx6110. Again, there are notebook displays out there that do better here, but the nx6110 isn't actually this bad.
The LCD, when closed, doesn't touch the keys so you don't have to expect display damages so easily. The HP nx6110's lid is closed with a balt on the front side of the notebook. This prevents the display from opening by accident. The display lid is hold savley in place and thus perfectly secure for longer journeys. Anyway, it is wise to use a special notebook rucksack or bag for carrying it around, because high pressure onto the display cover could cause damage to it.
As you can see, the display's brightness is quite the same all over the whole area. As the following pictures may not indicate, it is getting a little darker in the bottom left and right corner of the screen, though. (About 5x5 pixels each are affected.) The other corners, that is the upper right and upper left ones, have basically the same brightness as the rest of the display. The first picture is irritating, since the background image actually gets darker in the upper right corner, but not the screen! The second image shows the display illumination: Near to perfect!
I personally like track points (DELL, IBM) better than touchpads. But with two weeks of practise and a little configuration tweaking I could get pretty fast with it, as well. There are definitely many, many worse touchpads on the market. The integrated speakers are placed at the bottom of the frontside and play sufficiently loud. As one might expect, bass tones sound a little crappy but that's something every notebook has to deal with. The actual system outperforms my current desktop by far (900 MHz). With 1.86 GHz it has much of processing power, and the tremendous RAM (1024 MB) can be considered future-safe, even if you take into account the i915 has a shared memory architecture.
This is what makes the nx6110 EK106ES such a great deal for people who value ac-cu time: The chip needs little current input, while it has the disadvantage of being rather lame compared to recent desktop graphic cards. It is by far enough for playing DVDs and many (not all, of course!) of today's three dimensional applications (OpenGL), anyway. A huge hard disc with 80 GB reaches excellent speed values.
Finally, if your expectations approximately meet what I described in the "My expectations" section, you will certainly like the nx6110 as much as I do. It is a robust working machine which seems to be inspired by former IBM quality, but is available at much cheaper costs (~ 1200 Euros). With dimensions of 33cm * 26,5 cm * 4,0 cm and a weight of 2,6 kg it is mobile enough for my taste. When you don't need to have an ac-cu on-board, you can painlessly remove it and store it on a cold place. This is one of many examples of how well planned the nx6110 is: The nx6110 is a very silent and robust device that is fun to work with. It can run for hours and hours. It seems very grown-up. It has no hidden errors. It just works.
If I were to re-buy it, it'd do so without a doubt. In my opinion, that's the most convincing argument any product can receive, after all. If you are in doubt whether to get an nx6110 EK106ES, I can tell you there are many, many different model versions of the nx6110 available, some of which even have a Celeron CPU. Should you prefer an AMD Turion based device, I recommend you better take a closer look at the nx6125 series, which is quite compareable with the nx6110, since they share many components such as display and case.
If you want to run Linux on it, go on and read my definite guide about installing Linux on an HP nx6110 EK106ES.
The ac-cu that ships with the hp nx6110 ek106es is sufficient for a runtime of near to 3 hours when enabling Wlan and Bluetooth.
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