HP Elitebook 2530P - up close and personal pt1

Now if you have known me a bit longer, you would know that once a device comes within reach of my personal IwannahavethatNOW-zone, there's only two things that can help a device cross that boundary. A solid field test and a fair bit of surgery.

Given the fact that this particular Elitebook needed to remain at the CntrStg for the duration of the event, surgery was the only option available to me. Thank god therefore that US customs overlooked this itsy bitsy teeny weenie screwdriver that I forgot to take out of my laptop accessory bag. This little oversight now enabled me to have a good look at this little beasts innards

(I am truly sorry HP, and I do solemnly swear that once I am done with her I will put her back together again. You will not notice that she was ever taken apart. Will this now ruin my chances of taking one out on the road for a field test?)

In the end I was glad I did open the Elitebook, because it had a few pleasant surprises in store for me.

First surprise wasn't so much a surprise as well as a confirmation of what I'd secretly hoped. The Elitebook 2530p in fact is already fully prepped for 3G. The mini PCI expresscard slot to accommodate the WWAN modem is there, the antenna cables are there and the sim card slot is there, nicely tucked away under the battery where it belongs.

The second surprise was the hard-drive. This discovery actually almost made me want to nick the drive because it was a newly introduced Toshiba 1.8" Sata drive from the MKxx29GSG series. The MK1629GSG is a 160Gb SATA II 5400rpm drive with a host transfer rate up to 3.0Gbps and an 8Mb cache buffer. Quite a nice performer and a disk I seriously would like to have in my own Lenovo X300 machine. While very nicely specked, 64Gb for me is on the small side even if it's SSD.

At first I was a bit puzzled by the presence of only one single memory slot, containing exactly 1Gb of memory but a quick glance within Windows XP showed that the machine in fact had 3Gb of memory onboard so a 4Gb configuration and a 64-bit OS definitely is a possibility.

In short a second, more up close look at the machine definitely brought the Elitebook 2530p even closer to my IwannahavethatNOW-zone. That compact and yet that performing? My name written all over it ...

More to come (if HP does not takeway my screwdriver that is)