It does the business.

When it comes to laptops I use a Wintel machine for work, and an Apple Mac for pleasure.

It would be unfair to compare this to my Mac (this would rate quite low compared to the Apple laptops) but I have had experience with Windows based laptops in the past and this is the best I've ever used.

The touchpad is nice and large, the right hand-side of the pad is used to scroll up and down. There are two sets of left and right click buttons, they are located above and under the touchpad. This seems bizarre, but I think the top set are designed to be used with the blue `nipple' button which can be used to move the cursor if you don't fancy using the touchpad or a mouse. I have colleagues who have had issues with this though as the rubber button keeps bouncing off the keyboard as they tap away.

This is an upgrade of the previous model, and it looks very similar. The main change to the aesthetics is the touch sensitive bar at the top of the keyboard. This contains volume up/down, mute, presentation settings, HP info centre, and toggles wireless on and off. It's tempting to give this a wipe every so often as it is shiny and attracts fingerprints - but doing so tends to lead to me adjusting the volume and knocking off the Wifi! The volume control can be a bit of a pain as it's difficult to get it exactly where you want it, but you can always adjust using the volume icon in the system tray.

The keys feel nice and the whole thing feels nice and solid. There are 3 USB ports, 2 on the left and one on the right. It's good that these are on both sides as it means any mouse cable doesn't have to trail around the laptop.

In a nutshell: This is a fast windows laptop which should suit most people for work. It feels plasticky - but solid. The fan is pretty quiet and the grey finish looks stylish. It's not the thinnest laptop in the world, but it's the thinnest HP laptop I've come across - and compared to business laptops in the past, this is quite svelte. The screen is more than capable of displaying well, it isn't shiny and reflective - it handles well in office lighting and has a wide viewing angle.