The HP ProBook 4520s is an all -purpose laptop that especially targets small business owners and profesionals on a budget. The 15.6 inch machine can offer you a pretty running time with its battery. That makes it ideal for office, hope and more importantly travelling. The machine starts at a fairly affordable price of $719, but the machine under review here will set you back a slightly higher amount of more than $800.

The system is powered by a intel core i5 430M processor with a pretty solid speed of 2300 MHz. HP also installed a 4 GB memory. The storage comes in the form of a single hard disk drive with a commendable capacity of 320 GB and a robust speed of 7200 rpm. The hard disk is suplimented by other storage facilities that include; the memory stick, SDHC card and an XP -picture card. The unit comes with an ATI Radeon HD 4350 GPU. That kind of graphics, even though upgradable, makes the HP ProBook unsuitable for modern games. Latest games like Call of Duty and Dragon Age are almost unplayable. But aging games like DirectX9 can be played if you set the graphics at medium levels.

The machine comes with a chiclet -style keyboard that is quite spacious. The generous space makes for a comfortable typing experience. The touchpad on its part is also wide and supports multitouch gestures. The device comes with smallish speakers that affect the audio playback. You will do well to aquire headphones as they offer good sound quality. The machine scores 103 on the WorldBench 6 Test, which will not set the world alight.

The HP ProBook operates Microsoft Windows 7 Home Professional Edition. Some of its softwares include; PDF Complete, Corel Home Office and ArcSoft media suite. The networking chores are taken up by 802.11n/b/g wi fi and ethernet. You will also get a bluetooth as part of the deal. The machine comes with 3 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, and eSATA/USB dual port. It tips the scale at 5.7 pounds, which gets to 6.6 pounds when fully ensuite. It measures 14.4 inches by 9.8 inches by 1.5 inches ( length, depth, height respectively ).

The machine comes with a maximum resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. The battery also returns a pretty solid time as it almost ticks the clock for 4 hours when running high -definition movies. So you can expect more run time when performing other less demanding jobs, which was its forte in the first place. For multimedia enthusiasts, you should look elsewhere for salvation.