HP Elitebook 2540p Pro Reviews

The EliteBook 2450p is an excellent business tool with great build quality and excellent usability. But where it really shines is everyday performance.

Small enough to travel anywhere, the EliteBook 2540p breezes through business tasks.

For weeks where airports turn into offices, coffee is more like water, and every night ends in a different hotel room, it’s not hard to see why a notebook like the EliteBook 2540p can become a workaholic’s best friend. Durable, capable and small enough to always keep on hand, the EliteBook earns its business-grade price tag with features business-savvy owners want. The rather dull display and lack of 3D graphics card will limit its capabilities as an entertainment machine, but otherwise HP’s wide range of custom configurations will tailor it to just about anything your budget can accommodate. Just beware: True road warriors will want to shell out for a nine-cell battery to coax a real full day’s work out of the beast when away from wall outlets.

The HP EliteBook 2540p (version WK302EA) gets a ‘Very Good’ from us, and can hold its head high in the subnotebook community. The high-performance Core i7-640LM (2 x 2.13 GHz, Turbo Boost, hyper-threading) is a worthy successor to the low voltage Core 2 Duo processors (the SL/SP series) that were previously the strongest. Although held back somewhat by the slow 1.8-inch hard drive, the system performance approaches the level of powerful Core i7 systems (non low-voltage).

Overall, the HP EliteBook 2540p is faster and has more connectivity options than the 2530p. It's also expensive. But if you're in business and you want a strong yet small and fast notebook with good energy-efficiency credentials, then it's worth hassling your financial controller so that can eventually get your hands on it.

HP added an optical drive, Core i7 power, and a host of extras to this already-solid 12.1-inch model. The result? The best mainstream business ultraportable we’ve seen.

The HP EliteBook 2540p easily ranks among the better 12-inch ultraportable business notebooks we've seen. It offers exceptional build quality and a well-crafted design on par with its main competitor, the ThinkPad X201, and offers a very similar parts configuration. In terms of beating the competition, the 2540p offers a built-in optical drive whereas the ThinkPad X201 doesn't. For some users this isn't generally a problem and the X201 managed to get higher battery life figures from the same hardware configuration sans optical drive even with a higher resolution screen.

The HP EliteBook 2540p makes the fewest sacrifices among its rivals, but you have to be willing to put up with a 12-inch screen.

This good-looking and durable business ultraportable offers a great combination of speed and battery life.