In the last couple of months, I’ve tested a variety of enterprise laptops to see how they work with Windows 11 and how vendors have adapted their machines to Intel’s Tiger Lake processors.
One of these is HP’s EliteBook 840 Aero G8, the 2021 version of the PC maker’s lightweight midrange enterprise laptop. It offers good performance and a number of interesting extras on the software front without the bells and whistles of HP’s higher-end 1000 series. (The regular 840 series is about half a pound heavier.)
The EliteBook A840 Aero G8 is a 14-inch notebook that measures 0.71 by 12.73 by 8.45 inches and weighs 2.54 pounds (3.26 pounds with the charger). That makes it bigger than smaller executive alternatives such as HP’s Elite Dragonfly Max, but at a mainstream price while still offering more portability than the standard enterprise notebooks.
It’s a nice silvery design—not flashy, with all the features you’d expect and then some. The backlit keyboard seemed pretty good, and it has a nice size touchpad with physical buttons, as well as a pointing stick in the keyboard. It has a dedicated power key, as well as a programmable function key. Overall, I found it comfortable to type on.
It offers an impressive selection of ports. The left side of the device has two USB-A ports (one of which offers charging) as well as a headset jack; the right side has two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports (which are used for charging), an HDMI port, a 4.5-mm charging port (although the unit I tested came with a USB-C charger), and a slot for a SIM card for 5G connectivity. About the only thing missing is an SD or microSD card slot.
Of course, for more ports, you can use a USB-C dock. I tried it with both the HP USB-C Dock 5 and OWC’s Thunderbolt Dock, and it worked fine with external drives, an external keyboard, and with both an 2,560-by-1,440 HDMI monitor and an Full HD DisplayPort monitor.
The version I tested had a standard full HD (1920 by 1080) non-touch display. Other options include HP’s SureView Reflect privacy screen, which in the past I’ve been pretty happy with, and a brighter display. But there’s no 4K option, and all the screens have a 16:9 ratio instead of the 16:10 or 3:2 ratios I’ve seen on some higher-end units. Still, I had no complaints with the screen.
It came with both an HD (720p) camera and an IR camera, but lacked the presence detection available in the 1000 series. There’s also an option (not tested) for a Privacy Camera, which notifies you if someone is behind you. It has a tiny physical switch to cover the webcam, and signing in via Windows Hello worked well. The machine also comes with a fingerprint reader.
For video conferencing, the camera offered a clear display. Audio features include Bang & Olufsen speakers and an HP Audio Control app that lets you enable noise cancellation for both speakers and the microphone as well as setting an equalizer. All of this worked well.
The unit I tested had an 11th Generation Intel Core i7-1185G7 (Tiger Lake), a 4-core/8-thread processor with a nominal speed of 3GHz and vPro support, made on Intel’s 10nm SuperFin process, with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. Benchmarks results were generally pretty consistent with other machines with this processor; not the fastest but certainly quite good.
On my most difficult performance tests, it took 42 minutes to complete a large Excel model with a data table and Monte Carlo simulations, a minute under the Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen 6 and two minutes less than the Dragonfly Max, both of which have the same processor. It took 49 minutes to execute a complex MatLab portfolio simulation, compared with 47 minutes for the Yoga and 60 for the Dragonfly Max.
It has a 53-watt hour battery; I got over 11 hours on my battery test. PCMag got more than 17 hours in a video playback test, not best in class but still quite good.
The unit I tested had the optional 5G connection using a Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 modem. I recorded speeds of between 77 and 235Mbps down; and 3.6 to 52Mbps up on Verizon’s network, which in all but one case was sufficient for video conferencing. It also has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth.
HP include a lot of software with the 840 Aero. Some seems quite useful if a bit confusing, such as HP Wolf Security, which includes HP Sure Click, a version of the Bromium software that creates a separate micro-virtual machine for each browser tab, PDF viewed in the browser, or Word document. It should offer additional protection from malicious pages or documents. It also comes with McAfee Security Scan Plus, which in turn seems to exist mainly to sell you McAfee WebAdvisor and Safe Connect.
There are other interesting pieces of software, such as HP Easy Clean, which lets you temporarily disable devices such as the keyboard, touchpad, and touch screen so you can clean them while the computer is still on, a useful little feature.
The base model of the EliteBook 840 Aero G8 starts at $1,663 with an Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. The unit I tested would is currently offered for $2,239, not including the 5G modem. It’s a pricey but attractive option for corporate buyers who want a relatively lightweight machine with a lot of features, but don’t need the flashiest option.
