Greatest Laptop in the World... Tribute

by Justin Doughty

This is a tribute to the best laptop I have ever known.

Many years ago I was passed an HP EliteBook 8570w (pictured above) with some light use, after my previous Dell laptop started to blue screen.

Over the years it has handled everything I could throw at it, large detailed files, renders, point clouds, real time visualisations. It has also had 6 year versions of every Autodesk AEC product installed/uninstalled and used daily. For me, the most important thing is that it has been stable and consistent. This is one of the most important things I suggest when asked about specs for machines. It doesn’t have to have the highest performance, or be the prettiest machine, it has to have decent components that all work together.

You may think this is a one-off and I’ve just been lucky with this one machine, but there are at least 3 other laptops of this model in the support team and they all are still going strong.

It has had 2 upgrades in its life, its memory upgraded to 16gb, and the most noticeable performance gain an SSD. However in the end it started to show its age, struggling with larger/more complicated 3D models. Very reluctantly this month, it was the end of an era for me. Although it will still go on to be used elsewhere for testing or training.

So you may be wondering what the replacement is? Well it’s a brand new HP ZBook 15 G6, and I’m very impressed with it: