With its charcoal gray-and-black exterior, the nx6110 is a buttoned-down business notebook with its eye on the bottom line. For a tantalizing $799, you get a 15-inch display, a strong Wi-Fi connection, and a plenty-fast Celeron M processor. For those that could care less about frills like memory card slots and DVD burners, this 6.1-pound portable has the right combination of features to tackle your work day.
Except for the mic and headphone jacks, all the ports on the nx6110 are placed on the left side for convenient plug-and-play access. A standard DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive is on the right. It’s a smart layout, but HP should move the VGA port to the back and add a USB port on the right side in future updates, as that is where most right-handed users would connect a mouse or USB drive.
The full-sized keyboard is comfortable to use; the keys have the right springiness to make touch-typing a joy. We do wish there were dedicated volume control keys. The touchpad, after a few adjustments in the OS, was responsive, but we can’t say the same for the touchpad buttons; we were constantly pressing them by accident.
The 15-inch display is large enough for any application you’re likely to run. This is not a widescreen, so you won’t get DVD playback in the native 16:9 format, but with XGA resolution you’ll have enough real estate to work on a couple of applications at once.
A 1.4-GHz Celeron M processor powers the nx6110.
This CPU may have a bad rep when compared to its Pentium M brother, but this laptop is one of the fastest Celeron systems we’ve used. Most programs opened in about two seconds, and the system turned in a solid MobileMark score of 184.
With 512MB of RAM preloaded, the nx6110 multitasked well. We launched iTunes, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, and played the movie Shaun of the Dead simultaneously without much of a hiccup. We were even streaming music with iTunes off a nearby PowerMac G5. The DVD video and streaming audio remained smooth as we switched between applications and surfed the Web, but the built-in speakers won’t impress anyone’s ears.
The nx6110 remained cool throughout our torture test.
Another area where the nx6110 excels is its wireless performance. At 5 feet from our access point this system registered a fast throughput of 16.8 Mbps, and it dropped only slightly to 15.8 Mbps from 50 feet away. That means you should expect better Wi-Fi coverage with this notebook than with other bargain laptops, whether you’re in the office, at home, or at a hotspot.
The nx6110 turned in a respectable battery life of almost three hours. That’s about average for a budget system, and since this notebook is designed for only occasional mobility, getting a decent chunk of work done unplugged should be considered a bonus.
If you’re a gamer looking for a cheap laptop, you’ve pulled into the wrong driveway. With integrated graphics, most new games will refuse to run. We tried playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and the message box may as well have said, “Sorry, better luck next time. Give Ms. Pac-Man a try.” Backing up our impressions, the notebook failed to run 3DMark 2001 and barely registered a pulse in 3Dmark03.
The limited included software reflects the barebones nature of this notebook (and the low price). There’s a handful of utilities from HP, Intervideo DVD Copy, Sonic RecordNow, and a trial of Norton AntiVirus. You’ll need to add Microsoft Works or Office if you plan to use the nx6110 for real work.
Given its aggressively low price, the HP Compaq nx6110 has plenty to offer. It lacks multimedia capabilities and won’t turn any heads, but it’ll get the job done.