HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8
A top-quality laptop best suited to bigger businesses thanks to HP’s security and management tools
PRICE £1,563 (£1,876 inc VAT) from bechtle.com/gb
This is a business laptop that screams quality from every pore. Its slim chassis is built using magnesium, which is why it’s so solid yet so light: at 1.2kg you can slip the EliteBook 840 Aero into a briefcase or rucksack without feeling weighed down. (The “Aero” indicates that this is the lighter variant of the standard 840.) You probably won’t even need to bring the power supply with you as it lasted for a dozen or so hours in both of our light-use tests.
Don’t think it lacks power, either. Our test unit included a Core i5-1135G7, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB SSD, which pushed it to a nippy 143 in the PC Pro benchmarks and 4,846 in PCMark 10. This spec is still available from other retailers, but if you buy an 840 Aero direct from HP then your choices are, at the time of going to press, a Core i5/8GB/256GB version for £1,139 or a Core i7/16GB/512GB option for £1,343.
Removing the base gives access to both SODIMM sockets and the M.2 slot. HP doesn’t supply the speediest SSD but we’re confident this laptop will keep Windows 11 Pro running happily for years. It comes with a three-year warranty as standard, too.
More reassurance for businesses comes via the suite of tools HP offers with its EliteBooks, which include protected BIOSes, a three-year licence of HP’s Wolf Security Pro suite and comprehensive hardware protection: the infrared webcam and fingerprint reader for Windows Hello logins, plus a smart card reader on the left-hand side. There’s no shortage of ports either, with two USB-A connectors on the left, two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports on the right, plus an HDMI output. Our sample also included a nano-SIM slot, but that isn’t an option on the models bought direct from HP.
Traditionalists will also appreciate the trackpoint built into the centre of the keyboard, complete with physical left- and right-click buttons, but the star of the show is the keyboard itself. This is a joy to type on, with plenty of travel to the keys, separated out cursors and navigation buttons, plus clearly labelled function buttons.
The 14in screen is equally solid, covering 91% of the sRGB space with a peak brightness of 429cd/m 2 and excellent colour accuracy. We would have liked a touchscreen, but overall it’s a fine if unexciting inclusion.
Which sums up the EliteBook 840 Aero as a whole. Its key attraction is its portability, and with strong performance allied to HP’s suite of security software it should have obvious appeal to larger businesses looking for an easy-to-manage fleet.