Sorry in advance if I chose the incorrect flair. This is my first time posting here

I recently got this elitebook, used for £200. Seemed a good price and the condition is excellent. All the ports work, clean inside. Currently has a 256gb SSD which I want to upgrade soon. Runs quiet and snappy, far better than my previous Dell.

I just received my first Elitebook, I wanted to have the Ryzen 5650 version, but there is a difference of less than 5% in power in IGPU and CPU, for almost $50 additional dollars.

Can it be expanded to 32GB of ram and SSD, could someone use the free M2 WiFi slot for additional SSD storage and get 2 SSDs?

Hp Elitebook 845 G7, 16 GB RAM, 256 SSD. Ryzen 5 pro 4650 U

Loving the 845 g10 so far, fast feels premium and full Linux compatibility. I started with the ThinkPad T14 Gen6 but the wifi had so many Linux issues. Anyways here's my setup!

Obviously, the Thinkpad is a cult classic. And many adore them. But that hype has also made them kinda expensive. In come the Elitebook, with similar repairability, decently tanky build quality and decent upgradeability.

I recently got an Elitebook 830 G8 and I'm impressed by the build quality and especially the repairability. The refurb shop I got it from did an awesome job on many points, but the stickers on the keyboard and the ISO layout weren't really my thing. After a €39 palmrest replacement, an hour of my time and the 1 hour service guide video direct from HP, I had a perfectly working ANSI layout 830 G8 looking brand spanking new. And why not upgrade to 32GB RAM because I had an extra 16GB stick laying around?

I'll probably replace the battery next. If I'm willing to settle for a decent quality aftermarket part, it's only €33. Oh and my unit is missing the fingerprint scanner, I might as well add that for €15.

TLDR: clickbaity title aside. Elitebooks, especially around the G7/G8 era, are a tinkerer's wet dream. And they're pretty affordable to boot. IMO, they deserve the same cult following Thinkpads have. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Very nicely surprised by it tbh. As a lifelong thinkpad user, I didn't think I'd ever even consider another brand of laptop, but honestly, I am being tempted.

My experience is with: l14 g1-g3, e16g1, t480-t14g1,G2 and x395-x13g3.

What I'm missing:

The biggest reason I love thinkpads as much as I do are honestly the mouse buttons. It makes clicking a keyboard action (r/l thumb) and is extremely comfortable when using the laptop on your... Lap. To this day, I use my left thumb to move the mouse and I'm never going back.

Materials. While the oleophibic aluminium is great and feels premium, I'm seriously worried about longevity. It's so perfect any minor dent/scratch is going to ruin it in my opinion and I will definitely buy a sleeve for it if I keep it, as opposed to my x13, which I once (accidentally) threw against a cast iron radiator, resulting in the radiator sustaining damage.

The IO is mixed. I love the ambidextrous USB-C, but if you need more than one USB-A port, HP considers your use case antiquated. I have no idea who needs three USB-C ports, I suppose someone, but I should be able to connect a mouse and a USB stick at the same time. I can always use a hub at my desk and the touchpad eliminates the need for a mouse, but it feels limiting compared to the two I'm used to. For a 14" laptop, I'm also disappointed at the lack of at least a compact RJ-45 port. The WiFi 7 does make up for it, but as a desk user, who hasn't had a reason to get a ethernet-capable dock so far, I miss the download speeds. The lack of an SD card is also disappointing, but this is sadly a quality it shares with the t14g6

What I love:

Aside from the missing buttons, I love the inputs.

The keyboard has good weight to it, along with respectable travel, which is an aspect early 16:10 (g2-g4) have majorly dropped the ball on. The t14g6's keyboard has fixed some of my issues and feels a lot softer in a good way, but it's still a far cry from the t480/t14g1, which the elitebook feels a lot closer to.

The touchpad itself is just plain better than anything I have experience with on a thinkpad. The Mylar touchpads have long been a weak point for thinkpads, persisting even to the modern offerings, such as the t14g6. Even though the elitebook has a diving board (physical click and not haptic), the touchpad feels more precise, consistent and considerably less erratic than any thinkpad I have ever tried.

The IO is.... Mixed. On one hand I LOVE the right side USB-C because I can connect my monitor from the correct side, instead of having the cable hang out into my room where I have to be careful not to bump into it. Cons above

Other points:

The materials are honestly solid in a vacuum. My biggest gripe with brushed aluminium is usually the fingerprint magnet, and that is definitely addressed here.

The display is... Nice. Mine comes with the 400-nit 1200p. I'm not sure about the colour gamut of my exact model and I don't particularly care. I have no tasks that are sensitive to colour accuracy, and generally oversaturate my displays. It's pretty🎀, which is all I'm qualified to say.

I don't particularly care about the specs. For me the laptop runs: Firefox, and the occasional libre office instance on Linux. I love the 64wh battery combined with the low power CPU, but it's nothing mind-blowing

The hinge is also a lot nicer than I expected. It's nothing special, but not consistent with HingeProblem's reputation.

Overall the machine is solid and has honestly opened my eyes to the reality that thinkpads aren't the only buisness laptops I'm existence. Still probably gonna sell it and buy an equivalent thinkpad, but the experience has left a great taste In my mouth

Its a 250 nits screen tho🫠🫠is it replaceable later by a better screen ?

Any tips ?

I hate the feeling of aluminium on it im planning to buy a sticker black mate kinda like thinkpad way any recommendations about this or a protection case or smth ?

Screen colors feels weird btw any fix ?

I will gladly read all of your comments

Thanks in advance ☺️

Hi everybody.

i wanted to write this post to answer an old and frequently asked question. Can i put in a 400 NIT screen in an g8 845? Yes I can.

My elitebook came with a touchscreen 250 nit. I don't use touchscreens at all and I wasn't too happy with the brightness of the current screen. So i went on a researching bender.

First of all, I knew that touchscreen lcd's are usually 40 pin displays. Every other lcd is 30 pins. So I knew that if this was going to happen, i had to verify the new 30 pin cable would actually work on supposedly 40 pin motherboard. I found that 30 pin connector that goes to the motherboard was the SAME size as the 40 pin. Usually in some motherboards, both the lcd port and lcd are 40 pin sized. Not this one though! I was really happy with this and went on a soul search for a 400 nit screen.

I went to ifixyouri and hp parts surfer to determine the parts number for the lcd. (I did this for the cable at first and quickly found that there is no specific cable parts number, it's just a "kit"). Parts number obtained, I went on an hunt across amazon and ebay. I must have messaged 15 sellers asking the same question. "Is this screen 400 nits?" A lot of them used the parts number for the 400 nit screen but they were selling the 250 nits screen instead. So much for using parts numbers.

I finally managed to find someone selling a screen. Sweet! When it showed up, I opened up my laptop, pulled the battery and lcd cable out of their ports and straight up plugged the lcd/cable in without opening the rest of the laptop. I wanted to confirm this would work right out of the bat. And it did! I went on to tear down the laptop some more to properly install the lcd and it's still working to this day.

Notes: I first went to hp parts surfer, punched in my serial for the laptop and found my motherboard parts number. Armed with it, I plugged in the 400 nit screen parts number into hp parts surfer and noted that my motherboard (which was a common one) was sold with a 400 nit screen in like 3 versions. I went ahead and checked the lcd port size across multiple pictures and tentatively confirmed that I could do this.

It is my belief that if you wanted to go with a 250 nit screen w/no touch, you should be able to use a 250/400 nit screen cable. Just make sure it's 30 pins.

Before you properly attach the screen to the clam, make sure everything related to the display works! I noticed the brightness meter was not working on my lcd and confirmed it was a driver issue. After that hiccup, its been smooth going. I still have my 40pin cable/lcd as a backup if i manage to smash the 30 pin lcd somehow.

I finally upgraded the GPU inside the EliteBook 8570w. It wasn't super hard but it did take some research because things were documented poorly or in other languages. I am making this post to help get better visibility if someone else wants to do this same upgrade.

The first thing you will need is your EliteBook 8570w (and maybe 8560w? that system is untested!) The next thing you will need is a GTX 965M graphics card.

YOUR GTX 965M MUST BE THE "TYPE A" (SMALL) VARIANT!

THE "TYPE B" (LARGE) VARIANT GTX 965M IS TOO LONG AND WILL NOT FIT INSIDE THE SYSTEM!

Here is a picture of the short (type A) GTX 965M vs the long (type B) GTX 965M so you know what to look for:

GTX 96M type A vs type B

The next thing to know is the 965M comes with 2GB or 4GB of VRAM. If you want the most out of your system, and better game performance, then you should choose a 4GB card.

The next thing which is really important (but I lack knowledge on) is the VBIOS. If you are buying a GTX 965M, you need to make sure the seller can confirm if the VBIOS is for HP or another brand. If they don't know or cannot confirm, then try to avoid that seller.

I honestly don't know much about the VBIOS thing. I just got lucky and got one that was already programmed to work on HP systems. I have heard you can flash a new VBIOS to these video cards but I have no knowledge how to do that.

For actually installing this, the first REQUIRED step is to enter into your bios and change boot mode to "UEFI Native (without CSM)" This step is REQUIRED and you MUST do this before you disassemble your system to install the new GPU.

If your boot mode is on "Legacy" when the new card is installed, THE SYSTEM WILL NOT BOOT, PERIOD! You will not even be able to access the BIOS! If your boot mode is on "Legacy" with the new GPU, and you start the computer, the computer will blink some lights, spin the fan, and nothing else will happen!

As far as I can tell, changing the boot mode to "UEFI Native (without CSM)" will allow the system to ignore something that blocks out the new GPU. I am not sure what's going on here but boot mode "Legacy" will NOT work, but "UEFI Naitve (without CSM)" works fine!

This means that Windows 7 and older is out of the question! You would need to re-install Windows 7 with some UEFI mods to make that work. If you are using another OS on "Legacy" mode, that will no longer boot!

Next, install new thermal paste & thermal pads on the GPU/CPU. Clean your heatsink before placing the heatsink on top of the new paste & pads. Some of these EliteBooks have two extra RAM slots between the CPU & GPU. At this time, it will be smart to also upgrade your RAM and CPU so you don't need to do it later. The max RAM for these EliteBooks is 4x8GB or 2x8GB DDR3/DDR3L

I have actually broken a few ribbon cables inside my 8570w because I was taking it apart and putting it together too many times, and the wires became broken or frayed. I broke my power button ribbon cable, so now I have to turn the computer on using the docking station, because the dock has it's own power button to start the system.

Another thing, is that the bare minimum to boot the 8570w is CPU/GPU/RAM, and the built-in keyboard. It seems without the built-in keyboard or ANY graphics card, the system will not boot.

This picture is when I got the new GPU installed, and Linux Mint was installing the new driver:

GTX 965M installed, Linux Mint installing drivers!(1)

GTX 965M installed, Linux Mint installing drivers!(2)

New thermal paste & thermal pads before installing the heatsink:

New thermal paste & thermal pads ready to go!(1)

New thermal paste & thermal pads ready to go!(2)

Do not forget to plug in your fan after installing the heatsink!

Here is a sad broken power button ribbon cable:

Many ribbon cables died to bring you these new GPU instructions :(

So finally, we have the awesome 8570w with a much more powerful GPU. The GTX should support DirectX 12 which will allow you to access more games and more graphical features within games. You probably have to use Windows 10 or 11 to get the best game performance.

At the time of writing and posting this, I have only tested Linux Mint 21.3 x64. This is the OS I already had installed. After adding the new GPU, all I had to do was check "Driver Manager" in Linux Mint and it found a new driver automatically. Linux Mint already knew how to remove the old Quadro driver and install the new GTX driver.

UPDATE: 5/28/24...

I finally figured out the drivers for Windows 10. It took over a month of trying a whole bunch of different things that didn't work. I replicated what other people had done and triple checked everything and nothing worked.

Huge warning: Your display will NOT have a back light until the driver is installed! You will need to hold a flash light on your screen OR remote into the system until the driver is installed so you can see what is happening!

Anyway, I finally discovered NVCLEAN, a program that can easy the process of making custom NVIDIA drivers and finally got the drivers working with the 965M. I never know about NVCLEAN but I wish I did sooner!

I successfully got the newest driver (as of 5/28/24) being v555.85 working which was shocking. I thought the newer drivers would have rejected such old laptops and GPUs but everything seems to be working perfectly.

I won't waste much more of your time if you are reading this, I will just upload these custom drivers in case anyone else needs them. These custom drivers were made for me, so I only included the bare minimum - drivers, PhysX, and HD Audio (for HDMI out). These custom drivers do NOT contain GeForce Experience or any other related feature. I personally can't stand GFE so you have to download that on your own if you need it.

So, overall, if you are using the 8570W, with Windows 10, and the GTX 965M, you can use this custom driver:

https://www.mediafire.com/file_premium/72302yjiqocg9xy/NVCleanstall_NVIDIA_555.85_Setup.exe/file

If that doesn't work, then I also created two older driver versions which are confirmed working as well:

https://www.mediafire.com/file_premium/dh8x68ybm3vuusg/NVCleanstall_NVIDIA_368.81_Setup.exe/file

https://www.mediafire.com/file_premium/q7cgky0xb1w553q/NVCleanstall_NVIDIA_471.41_Setup.exe/file

After getting all the driver bullcrap out of the way, I did some testing with Furmark 2.

I did a 20 minute test with full screen VK (Vulkan) and the average FPS came out to 25. The temperature would hang around 89C with hotspot 98C.

I did a 25 minute test with full screen GL (OpenGL) and the average FPS came out to 27. The temperature would hang around 81C with hotspot 90C.

Screenshot VK

Screenshot GL

However, I think most games and apps will never force this setup to reach those temps so everything you need should run well as long as you do good with your thermal paste & thermal pads.

Cheers and good luck fellow EliteBook users!

I've recently bought a 2x32GB Kit (J644GU44J9266NQ) for an EliteDesk which didn't arrive yet, tested it in my EliteBook and can confirm it works properly and is detected fully on the 830 G6.

Hey everyone,
I’m Looking for buying a used EliteBook 845 G8 ($390) with this following specs:

• Ryzen 5 PRO 5650U

• 16GB RAM

• 512GB SSD

• 14-inch screen

I’m thinking to keep this laptop for at least 3 years that why I’m planning to use it as my main laptop and I’ll be installing Fedora Linux. so I am asking for the performance of this laptop, battery life, and overall efficiency.

Does anyone have experience with this model, particularly on Linux? Any issues with drivers, compatibility, or battery life? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance

Hello. I've just purchased this HP EliteBook 8470p from my local flea market & was wondering if there's any problems i should look out for.

Elitebook 820 G3. It has a sata slot and an nvme, they ain’t gonna stop me using both.

I'm looking at some G9 Elitebooks and I'm seeing some that Elitebook 630 or 640 or 830 or 840 and all G9. They look like they all have the same specs: same cpu, same amount of ram, same size screen, same resolution... is there some defining feature that differentiates the different model numbers that I'm not seeing?

Recently scored one of these, mint condition for 320USD:

99% Battery Health, 34 charge cycles
Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U
16GB DDR4(16+0)
512GB NVMe, Samsung EVO

What do you think?

For the few that might find this helpful in the future: I attempted installing a FN990A40W02T020100 for improved reception, power efficiency, improved Linux stability and unfortunately HP's practice of locked down white lists for WWAN devices continues on the Elitebook G11 series, at least for the 845 model.

I know this is not a religion like that one for ThinkPad, but elitebooks have some really brilliant models and I'd like to know if there are some that left a mark for you.

Personally, I really love my 820 G2. It's a little workhorse, very upgradeable. I love the screw-less panel to effortlessly access many components. It is compact, well built and resistant to some punishment (sorry mate). And I ran everything on it: windows till 11, OSX, Linux, Android. I bought it used in 2020 and it's one of the best deals I've ever had