HP Compaq 6720s review

Our review model had an 80GB hard drive spinning at 5,400rpm. The other two models in the range sport 120GB and 160GB hard drives. The optical drive, which lives on the right-hand side, is a DVD+/- RW SuperMulti drive and is consistent across all three models.

There's a fairly limited selection of connectors and slots. The front edge houses microphone and headset jacks plus an SD/MMC card slot. The front of the casing slopes away from you, which creates a neatly stylised look but means you may have to fiddle around to locate the flash card slot.

The optical drive is the only occupant of the right side, while the back edge houses the removable Li-ion battery -- which is entirely obscured when the laptop is opened, thanks to the unusual lid-opening system noted earlier.

The left edge carries the Ethernet and modem ports, along with a VGA connector, an ExpressCard slot and three USB ports. The latter are ranged side-by-side towards the front, and if your peripherals are in any way bulky you may struggle to use all three at once.

Performance
The HP Compaq 6720s delivered a Windows Experience Index (WEI) rating of 2.0 out of 5.9. The WEI corresponds to the lowest component score, which was from the graphics (desktop performance for Windows Aero) subsystem.

The highest component score, 4.9, came from the primary hard disk (disk data transfer rate). The remaining scores were 2.8 for gaming graphics (3D business and gaming graphics performance), 3.9 for processor (calculations per second) and 4.5 for RAM (memory operations per second).

Conclusion
This is a budget laptop, so a moderate specification is only to be expected. The range of connectors is not huge, there's no fingerprint recognition, no webcam and no wide-area wireless networking like 3G, HSDPA.

However, what this laptop does have works well enough. Apart from the Aero graphics, the WEI scores suggest that the 6720s is a competent performer and it could fit the bill if you don't need serious CPU or graphics power, and are likely to spend most of your time in the office rather than on the road.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday