Photo courtesy of Mario Nagano of www.ztop.com.brText and photos by Alex Davies
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of touring HP’s Houston Labs, where they put their commercial hardware through the wringer to test its durability and quality. This large facility was the former headquarters of Compaq before the merger with HP, and it was interesting to see the relics of the former company everywhere we went. Many of the engineers we spoke to on the tour were former Compaq employees who have been working in these labs for years.
One of the mantras that we heard during the tour is that they “freeze it, bake it, shake it, break it”, and as we walked around the facility, we really did see HP’s engineers subject desktops, notebooks and tablets to all manners of torture – the job wasn’t done until the product broke. Hit jump for our report on HP's Houston Labs.
The primary focus of our tour was on how HP business-class notebooks and mobile workstations held up, and the majority of the hardware we saw was 14-inch and 15-inch ZBooks. These mobile workstations are MIL-STD 810G certified and receive 115,000-hours of testing, which is mostly done at these labs.
The Houston facility is divided into a number of labs, and we got to see six of them – the Multimedia Lab, the Software Testing Lab, the Environmental Lab, the Reliability Lab, the Materials Lab and the Electromagnetic Lab.
You can check out part one of our pictures from our tour below, covering the first three labs, along with the short video above highlighting what goes on in the Environmental Lab.
Multimedia and Software Testing Labs
The Multimedia Lab is where HP tests new multimedia technologies that they are planning on integrating into their business-class machines.
When we toured the lab, they were showing-off the new Nvidia graphics cards and Thunderbolt features of the ZBook Mobile Workstations.
In the Software Testing Lab, HP tests the security features of their ProBook, Elitebook and ZBook notebooks, including encryption and HP’s BIOS security technologies.
In the Software Lab HP also tests the machines so they are ready to pass Microsoft’s WHQL testing, so they can be "Certified for Windows.”
Environmental Lab
The Environment Lab was the main area that we saw hardware getting pushed to its limits - it’s in this lab where most of the freezing, baking, shaking and breaking happens.
Here HP drop tests both individual components such as hard-drives and complete devices such as tablets and notebooks.
They also test the packaging strength, with and without hardware inside, so see how it fares when being shipped to resellers and retailers.
Along with all this destructive testing, there was one lone area where hardware didn’t have to be tortured – the anechoic chamber. This is where the noise levels of HP’s commercial desktops and notebooks are measured.
As you can see from this slide show, HP’s commercial notebooks and workstations are put through a wide variety of tests to see how they fare, so that users end up with something that not only performs well, but can survive a lot more abuse than your average consumer machine.
One interesting aside was that while no one in the Lab would go on record about this, it was clear that HP also tests their competitor’s hardware here too to see how they compare.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of our coverage of HP Houston Labs, where we visit the Reliability, Materials and Electromagnetic Labs.