HP rolls out notebooks: Hails Windows 7

Hewlett Packard said it released two notebooks and a desktop as the spearhead of further introductions aimed at encouraging businesses to upgrade.

The company said that it will shortly introduce the HP ProBook 6445b and the ProBook 6545b with a range of battery and wireless connectivity options.

The ProBook b-series notebooks use AMD microprocessors and HP claims an astonish improvement in battery life for up to eight hours and 15 minutes, and a performance boost of 39 percent using Mobilemark 2007 figures.

Screen sizes are 14-inch of 16.6-inches and will support GPS features to track down stolen machines, provided that the notebooks are equipped with HP Mobile Broadband.

Docking stations allow the machines to use up to six USB ports and e-SATA, have two DisplayPort connectors and also come with a proprietary HP docking station cable lock.

The desktop PC is the HP Elite 7000, equipped with Windows 7, DDR3 memory support, an Intel P55 Express chipset and a choice of either i5 or i7 CPUs. Up to eight gigabytes of memory can be installed, and the machines can be fitted with one terabyte hard drives.  There’s also a RAID 1 mirroring array.

The Elite 7000 comes with a S-ATA DVD ROM drive, a S-ATA DVD writer drive and an optional S-ATA Blu Ray writer.

The notebooks have starting prices of $799 while the Elite desktop will start at $789.  Machines will be available in the US in mid November, but will ship to other countries worldwide on October 22.