Best Budget Laptop For Adobe Creative Cloud (2024 Updated)

See the title for my first impression. I will first say that the first one of these I received kept giving me BSODs (blue screen of death) every day or so in the middle of doing things. It would then restart and seem OK for a day, then it would do it again.

I took it back to Microcenter, and we switched it out for another one, switching the heard drive in the process. After getting the Bitlocker protection to let me into the moved hard drive, everything was OK from there.

No more BSODs. I did a little research with the MyASUS utility on the laptop and it may have been an incompatible video driver. I’ll add here that right after getting the laptop the first time, it upgraded to Windows 11, and win 11 may have added the wrong video driver.

I manually went in and updated the video driver the same night I brought the 2nd one home and haven’t had any BSODs. It’s been a week that I’ve had it with no problems. My recommendation is to immediately go into the Asus utilities and get your video driver updated.

Now that I got that out there, I am quite satisfied with the laptop with the two exceptions below. It boots very quickly, has a nice sized screen without being too wide like a 17″ screen seems to be for me.

The feel of the keys on the keyboard is nice. They’re chicklet style and fairly quiet, but not totally so. It’s backlit, which is nice, even if you’re in a well-lit room. The screen is OLED. That gives it nice, rich colors and deep contrast.

One thing to note, though, is that OLED screens can suffer from screen burn-in if you have a static image There are ONLY two things I don’t care for on it. One is the “new and improved because it’s bigger” touchpad, which gets in the way when typing.

While typing, it’s all too easy for your palm or the base of your thumb to momentarily touch the touchpad and move the insertion point up or down, sometimes into an entirely different paragraph. I can’t completely work around this, but a free utility called Touchpad Blocker helps some.

You can have it turn off the touchpad while you’re typing and have a time delay of like 1. 5 seconds (you pick the interval) before the touchpad becomes active again. It prevents most of these inconveniences, but not all.

The other thing I don’t like is that the number pad is a bit strange, as it’s squeezed horizontally but not vertically, so the relative distances between the numbers and +,-, /, etc. , is strange if you’re used to a standard keyboard.

This, along with the touchpad, could have been better implemented by eliminating the number pad and centering the letter keys over the touchpad, which would make it less likely to bump the touchpad by accident while typing.

The touchpad is offset in relation to the letter keys, making it likely your right palm or thumb will hit the touchpad while typing.

My previous two laptops were both made by Acer and lasted almost 10-years each. ASUS has a good reputation and I was very impressed with the $499 price of this 17. 3″ screen laptop! It arrived in two days and was easy to set up.

I thought I lost a lot of pics and documents on my last computer, but I was surprised to find my items transferred over via the cloud once I clicked on the import bookmarks option on the Microsoft Edge browser! There are a few things that I don’t like, the biggest being the keyboard is not backlit; apparently, it’s an option on the ASUS Vivobook K712E laptops.

If you have the backlit keyboard, there will be a keyboard icon on the F7 function key; if the F7 function key does not have the icon, then the laptop does not have a backlit keyboard. Having read one of the reviews that mentioned the backlit keyboard, I thought it was standard.

I was wrong! The letters, numbers, etc. , are VERY hard to see, especially with the keys, mouse and keyboard cover all being the same, silver color! The letters/numbers on the keys are not painted on, they are translucent and I assume they are so to let the light through on those with the backlight option.

It’s a real disappointment in design! Next, there is no optical drive, but I knew that when I purchased it and know it’s more “the norm” these days than the exception. External optical drives can be had for around $20, so not a deal breaker.

The User Manual provided with the laptop is just a few pages; if you want the full manual, you’ll have to go online to ASUS’s site and download it. Again, not a deal breaker, but it would have been nice to have.

This ASUS K1712EA comes with the Intel i3 processor rated at 3. 3 GHz and one of its two, memory slots filled with 8 GB of RAM, which is expandible up to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, but that will add about another $175 if you do the labor, or, about a third of the cost of the computer.

That said, the processor speed and RAM is more than enough for all but those that do gaming. and if you want to have a gaming computer, I would not recommend this model if you want to do the newest of games.

I would recommend you spend a little more for a gaming computer. This laptop is good for work, education and most business functions. The screen displays well, but not on par with the best, however. The speakers are adequate for most tasks and on par with most average laptop speakers; you can always pair a wireless speaker like Sonos if you want better sound.

Battery life isn’t much, but if you’re like me and run your laptop off of the AC adapter 99% of the time, it’s not a big issue. If portability is a major concern, this may not be the best choice. I say this not that there is anything particularly wrong with this particular laptop, but any 17″ screen laptop might be a big clumsy for carrying it around and I would recommend a 14″ or smaller screen if you do a lot of traveling with your laptop (and something with a better battery life).

Not bad for $500!.

Four things that I hate about this computer: (1) The lighted keyboard is useless as it is not bright enough or the lettering on the keys does not conduct the light properly. (2) I have never had a laptop with a silver keyboard and I’d suggest that this is not a color that complements the background lighting and makes it difficult to see what the keyboard key is (for those keys that you use less frequently).

A dark keyboard (black) would provide a greater contrast and enhance the lighted keyboard feature. Tilting the screen forward helps, but it is the wrong direction for viewing as one typically tilts it back slightly.

(3) The mouse touch pad sensitivity is adjustable, but sliding your finger across the touch pad does not work well unless your finger is moist. If it is dry, it just slides across the face of the touch pad without moving the mouse correctly.

If you moisten the tip of your finger it seems to out more drag on your finger and the mouse responds correctly. (4) The battery life is the worst that I have ever had. The sticker on the keyboard says long battery life and that is misleading.

Anything with only 2. 5 to 3. 0 hours is pathetic. My previous Dell Latitude computer was 6+ hours and other computers are even 8-10 hours, so this is definitely at the bottom of the scale. worst of all, it is an internal battery and you can not replace it with one that has an extended life or greater mAh.

(Milliamp Hours) The price for this computer was good and I don’t want to go through the conversion process again, but I greatly regret ever making the purchase, and would not recommend it to anyone.

Asus has other models with a black keyboard and I would strongly recommend one of them and not this one with the silver keyboard. There are other features that I like about this computer though. The larger screen size (17.

3″) was achieved by having a smaller frame and the overall size of the computer was essentially the same as a computer with a 15. 6″ screen.

This laptop was worth every penny I spent on it. It works great on Linux without any driver installation needed, although the fingerprint reader and face recognition (which I don’t use anyways) did not work.

Those work fine on windows and are fairly accurate. Performance is very fast and the laptop is relatively quiet, but can get fairly hot when playing games or editing video. The keyboard feels nice to type on, the trackpad feels good and responds well, and the screen is clear and vivid.

I would’ve preferred a matte screen (anti reflective) personally, but it’s not a deal-breaker. The touch capability is a neat gimmick but I almost never use it, as I instead interact with the machine using a keyboard and trackpad or mouse.

The port selection is good as well, as the laptop supports charging with the USB-C port (you will need a 65+ watt brick though), which is great for me as it means less cables to carry. The laptop is also easily upgradable, with a repair video easily found on YouTube.

I upgraded my laptop to 16GB of RAM within about 10 minutes, and it worked perfectly. Build quality is surprisingly aluminium on most of the computer (apart from the bottom of the computer which is plastic), which i was not expecting.

Most laptops in this price range are made out of plastic with aluminium only being used on the back of the screen lid. NOTE: Please make sure to buy and install an extra 8GB stick of RAM! Using the single RAM stick will reduce graphics performance by about 30 percent.

I personally bought a Crucial 8GB DDR4 SODIMM module, and it works great in this machine. All in all, it’s a great computer with great performance for the price I paid for it. I definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking for a new laptop to run either Windows or Linux on.

When I began laptop shopping a few months ago, I knew exactly what I needed. I have a fairly powerful home desktop, with lots of storage, so for a laptop my primary concerns were fast processing, crisp visuals, and long battery life.

For this I was fully prepared to pay 4 figures. This laptop stood out to me as having all of the specifications that I sought, at a fraction of the price that I expected to pay, so it didn’t take long for me to make the decision to buy.

Having owned it for a month now, here’s my breakdown: The Good: The picture is just as crisp as my desktop monitors, if not more so. The included webcam, as well, offers a shockingly clear picture for Zoom calls and the like.

The keyboard is responsive and pleasant to type on. And, most important, this sucker is *fast*. I’m sure that will diminish with time somewhat, but it exceeded my expectations for processor speed. I’m very impressed.

The Bad: The laptop runs pretty hot. I use a lap desk with heat vents and even so, I can still sometimes feel the heat coming off of it. This isn’t an issue on its own, as it isn’t a concerning level of heat, but I suspect it’s a symptom of a bigger problem – battery life.

Using this for schoolwork (Google Docs / Sheets) or watching YouTube, I would say I get about 4 hours before it shuts off. That’s enough for my purposes, I’m rarely away from an outlet for more than 4 hours, but it’s well under the advertised 9.

25 hours which I find frustrating. Overall, I’m very pleased, and I would recommend this product for anyone in the market.

I have this three stars only because the red looks so cool. Which Is the entire reason I got one. However, this isn’t much more than a glorified chromebook. Yes it’s more than just a webbrowser, I know.

However the price is exorbitant for the amount of computer you get. 8 gigs I almost a joke. It’s incredibly sluggish even with the pentium gold processor it comes with. It has almost no durability as mine died with no more than a droplet of water that got near it Yeah I get water and computers are not a great combination, but considering I’ve spt e tire bottles of gatoradenon some past computers and with an overnight drying they ram like Champs.

Not a normal quality, yes burning you saw then pitiful amount that took this out, you’d be as disappointed (to say the least) as I was The next tier up is an even crazier price with the incredible price gap you’d think you’d be getting some kind of supercomputer, but you’d be wrong.

I would dream of spending that much skrill on such a. well. turd. The graphics aren’t anything to write home about and the Webcam is gritty choppy and has a hard time running if you’ve got anynother programs in the background.

Bloatware is always a problem with store bought computers, however this one wasn’t too out of control as it didn’t take up all the power, but still enough Uninstalling to irritate someone ever so slightly.

At least they aren’t cramming so much b. s down my throat. The processor seems to be a diamond I. ThE rough. It think it has potential but on such a low quality low power overly hyped up pretty pretty little princess of a computer, I wonder of it will be able to shake off the utter disappointment it must be getting from being placed in such a overpriced children’s computer.

The red tho. yeah it looks way cool. Cool enough to be duped into thinking 8 gigs and a plethora of other disappointing bells and whistles with the gold processor might be worth a look see. Wrong. Pass on this one there’s way better computers for less or for the same amount a high functioning more practical and way more durable competitors machine would do anyone way more justice.

Just no cool red paintjob. maybe just buy a sticker skin thingies and pretend. Who knows. Like inside I put this way down there with chrimevooks as far as functionality and usefulness. Firm pass.

This laptop was a great deal and for price and performance definitely 5 stars. However, battery life makes this laptop unusable unless it is kept plugged in. Unpacked laptop and plugged in to let charge to full.

Setup Windows 11 and then unplugged laptop. Just browsing web, battery went down to 20% in 1 hour. Plugged back in and charged full charge again. Had video medical appointment today and battery went down to 27% after 20 minutes.

The battery life renders this useless unless it is kept plugged in. Ryzen 5 laptops are known for their energy efficiency and battery life. This laptop has the shortest battery life of all the other Ryzen laptops on the market right now.

HP cut corners to lower the cost but they made a bad decision when it came to putting a useless battery in the laptop.

I was looking for a reasonably priced laptop with sufficient functionality and capacity for my every day use which is fairly basic (email, drafting and editing documents, social media, Zoom meetings, reading news subscriptions, etc.

). In the past I have owned a Surface Pro and a MacBook but I did not want to spend that kind of money. So far, the HP Laptop – 15z-ef100 has met all my needs and I am very satisfied. It seems to be a great product, especially for the competitive price.

I have only one criticism. I understand not backlighting the keyboard as that likely keeps the price down and/or saves the battery. However, the keyboard can be difficult to read in dim lighting. I suggest using sometime of reflective paint or other product on the letters, numbers, symbols to make the keys more readable in dim or non-direct lighting.

I’m not a gamer so I wasn’t looking for a Ryzen 7 with dedicated GPU. If you posted a bad review because it’s not good at gaming that’s on you. I purchased this laptop for general computing. Streaming, browsing and office applications.

It’s plenty fast enough for all of that even with multiple windows open. Good battery life. The ram can be upgraded to 32GB max if needed. Been using this for about a month now without regrets. For $399.

00 by far and wide the best value out there right now. I was using a 5 year old Chromebook and looking to buy another. Google stopped updating it and the battery stopped charging. To get anything appreciable your going to spend the same or more than this HP laptop.

No comparison to even the most expensive Chromebook. If your reviewing laptops and this is one of them look no farther. You won’t be sorry!!!.

Actually I’d say on the + side of 4½ stars. With the only complaint being a dead pixel in far upper right hand corner of the screen. It’s barely noticeable and only seen at certain angles. For a sub $400 laptop it’s pretty much loaded with touchscreen and Win10 Home.

I’m not using the “S” function. The PC comes preloaded with Win10 “S” but once you get things setup Win11 “S” starts downloading and installing. Very little HP bloatware. The very first thing I did before setup was open up the back and install an additional 16 gig of DDR4 memory.

It comes with 8 gig installed (one 8 gig stick). There are 2 memory slots that you can install up to 32 gig of memory. I’m now running 24 which is overkill but what the heck. Though the memory runs in dual channel mode, Ryzen processors allow you to run 16 gig in dual channel mode and the additional 8 gig in single channel.

I had a 16gig stick from my old Lenovo laptop so I just went ahead and used it instead of buying another memory stick. I also took a look at the hard drive and the access is super easy for it too. It’s a 256 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.

2 SSD. From my old laptop I have a 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M. 2 SSD that’s relatively new. I cloned the drive and will use it at such time as I may need it. The opening of the back of the laptop isn’t daunting at all.

Just remove the 8 screws, then use a guitar pick, or similar, to pop open the back. there are excellent youtube videos detailing the procedure. If it’s something you’re not comfortable with then by all means have a tech do it.

I received on Now. 8 th, and when I ordered it was a TSV, the price was so good I couldn’t pass up. I really needed a computer but so close to holidays worried about the monthly price, I’ve had a Q card awhile, so I called and was able to get the payments over 12 months which is wonderful.

It has been running well, what I liked is you can return up to the end of Jan. I figured if anything to go wrong in operation it will show up within the 2 1/2 months. I don’t think it will. The offer to go to Windows 11 came up but I really like Windows 10 and did not take that offer, maybe later.

The sound and video is very good also. I don’t have anything complicated to do, I watch movies, some shopping, bill paying, and some social media to keep in touch with family. I’m very pleased so far.

And Q card you made this affordable, for which I’m greatful !!! Oh what was annoying was the One Drive kept wanting me to get more storage, so I uninstalled it, I have a portable storage to keep all pics etc in, I also got from QVC a few yrs ago, so don’t need all that storage.

I hope I can continue to be pleased with this purchase. TY QVC for this great deal.

Generally small laptops are a bit of a mixed bag in terms of capability, construction and quality, all of which is somewhat sacrificed in the face of convenience of the smaller form factor while still carrying a premium price tag.

Asus with their Zenbook line has always shied away from this perception, consistently presenting a well built small form factor laptop with premium hardware and excellent battery life. So lets break it down.

When unpackaging the laptop, simply by opening the box, Asus has developed a small cardboard lift that presents the laptop to you like a gift as you raise the lid. It’s a small but noticeable touch that gives you a sense of welcome to your new piece of technology.

The laptop itself is shrouded in plastic and has a few stickers on it touting the quality of the display specifically due to it being an OLED. Outside of that there’s a small amount of printed documentation in the box, and of course the USB-C charger hidden under a flap on the side.

When removed you’re really hit by the quality of the construction, smooth to the touch with reasonable heft, though nothing obscene for the size of the machine (it’s only 3 lbs). The action of the hinge for the screen is smooth as expected.

One thing that is noticeable, however, is that Asus has chosen to go with a plastic shell. This was likely to save weight, so I cannot entirely fault them for the choice, the plastic they did use does not feel low quality, there’s no gapping or creaking and the laptop itself has almost no flex.

On bootup, you’re immediately hit by just how beautiful the screen is, vibrant and colorful, it’s everything that the stickers and documentation proclaims that it is. At 14″, the extremely high resolution (2880×1800) presents an image that is unparalleled, even if you have to use the scale slider in Windows 11 to make everything legible.

The initial setup of Windows 11 is straightforward, with the only addition being the warranty registration from Asus themselves. The same goes for the bloat on the laptop, it’s minimal, mostly consisting of warranty and update tracking software.

Moving to a discussion of the capabilities of the laptop, it is worth noting that it ships with a 12th gen i5 which while not top of the line, is appropriate for a small form factor laptop with battery life in mind, this is paired with LPDDR5 for additional capability and of course an nVME SSD.

All of these components come together to give you a well performing machine. The graphics are Intel’s current generation on-chip graphics but capable of a small amount of gaming should you choose to use it in this manner, but bear in mind, this is not a gaming laptop.

Applications, including Word, Excel, Photoshop and others open quickly due to the processor and SSD, however I find the 8GB of RAM to be very slightly on the anemic side in this era, but it should still be sufficient for most business and casual users.

Bottom line, this is an extremely well built laptop, with price and performance to match. There’s very little being sacrificed here, and provided you understand the machine that you’re buying, it’s arguable that those are not really sacrifices, but intentions of the platform itself.

All in all, I definitely recommend it to anyone in the market for a very capable small form factor machine if you do not want to feel like you’re giving up anything to have that improved mobility.

I purchased this device during the recent promotion in order to get the OLED screen in a 14″ form factor, to gain some experience with Windows 11 and the intel i5-1240P processor, and to see whether the 8 gb RAM/250 gb SSD configuration was limiting for my uses since that clearly allowed a very favorable price point while still getting the other features.

On the whole I have been satisfied. My comparison is to an LG-Gram 17″ with the 10th generation Intel i7 processor and a Samsung Flex 2 Alpha with an 11th generation Intel i7. Both of the latter computers are configured with 16gb RAM and 512 gb SSDs.

The screen on the Zenbook, of course, is a delight compared to other two devices, which are each very nice in their own right. It is sharper than the QLED on the Samsung due to its higher resolution and brighter than the good IPS screen on the LG Gram.

The Windows 11 adjustments to increase scale, text, pointer, and cursor size work well to optimize sizes of things that would be too small at the screen’s high native resolution. The ASUS Zenbook feels quicker than both the previous devices despite the decreased RAM and SSD size while simultaneously using multiple open browser tabs in both Explorer and Chrome, Microsoft office 365, Evernote, and a virtualized cloud-based EHR application running through Citrix Workspace.

The Zenbook runs hotter than the 11th generation i7 Samsung, but cooler than the i7 10th generation in the LG-Gram. Fan noise using balanced mode is minimal. As others have noted it is higher the first couple of days while many updates are being installed in the background, but even then was not obtrusive.

In balanced mode during periods of low processer use and lower fan activity Task Manage shows the processor to be running at 1. 2-1. 4 GHz. During more demanding work it runs around 2. 8-3. 8 GHz with the fan commensurately increased.

The bottom of the computer is quite warm at that point. I have not tested Performance mode where the processors and fan speed would be commensurately higher. No real need for that in any normal use I have.

WiFI 6 is very fast and connectivity is good, but the signal strength seems to be a little lower than on the other two devices at longer distances, maybe due to configuration of the internal antennas.

Keyboard is very comfortable and roomy making it easy to type without errors. Numeric keypad built into the mousepad is cute and works nicely while not interfering with normal mousepad functions. I wouldn’t have imagine I would have much use for it, but it works so well I am starting to take advantage of it.

The 3 lb. weight is not the lightest possible for this form factor, but is very comfortable to use and carry. The 14. 5″ screen provides a usefully larger work area than my 13. 3″ Samsung without a big increase of size, but the Samsung would clearly by much better for airline seat trays.

Neither of them matches the comfort of working with the 17″ LG Gram for things that benefit from a large amount of screen real estate, but that is a different beast entirely, so each has its ideal application.

Fingerprint sensor on the keyboard power button works great and is reasonable positioned. My main use situations do not challenge battery run time. I mainly work in very well lit areas attached to AC so I am most interested in having a bright easy to read screen rather than in dimming it to maximize run time.

I also keep the battery charge level to no more than 80% to maximize battery lifetime and on the Zenbook, which has a 60% setting, have been using that. When I disconnect from AC BatteryBar shows similar energy use to the other devices (running comparable progreams) and the battery in the ZenBook is as large as the one in the LG Gram and much larger than the one in the Samsung, so I am comfortable that run time will be very workable when I need to use it disconnected.

Windows 11 interface is a step back from Windows 10 in usability, but, fortunately, there is a great available utility program available for download on the web, StartAllBack, that quickly restores all Windows 10 taskbar functionality and also optionally provides the Windows 7 style smart menu I prefer.

The MyAsus utility that came with the computer allows nice optimization of battery charging patterns to preserve battery life and screen options to prevent OLED burn-in. I have been using the disappearing taskbar, which works fine although rarely it gets stuck in the ‘on’ position and needs to be corrected by restarting Windows Explorer from Task Manager.

Relative to concerns that have been raised in other reviews: — There is no creakiness of the hinges in the computer I have. — Various updates including BIOS have gone smoothly. I have not had to long press the power button to force hard reboots, but reboots particularly after BIOS updates can be slow, so best to be patient and allow them to happen on their own.

— No Bluetooth issues with mice or headphones as of yet. — Speaker sound is deep and rich for this size computer as pointed out by others. No static issues as of yet. Much better sound than on the LG Gram, which took a year for its speakers to ‘break-in’ and sound up to their capacity, but is still much poorer than the Zenbook speakers.

I would say the Pavilion is a pretty good laptop compared with the others. I didn’t want “the latest thing,” because I was looking for something that would last only a couple years. And yet, what was offered in the Pavilion was more than I expected.

If there is to be any complaints, the first is the lack of battery detail – there is no way this computer is going to get close to maximum power saving unless it’s utilizing the lowest screen brightness, power efficiency settings, no keyboard illumination, and doing the least CPU-related tasks.

Although I haven’t tested it that much, I can say that email, browsing, and word processing will get me about 7-9 hours using medium power settings (50% brightness, no videos playing, etc. ). I did have one day when I watched two hours of video that got me lower than 20% battery.

The second complaint is having the F# keys needing the fn button. Example: when I want to press F5 to refresh a page, I have to press fn+F5, otherwise without the fn it mutes the sound. I do like to flip the screen around and use it as a stand when watching shows.

The top has a decent magnetic spot where the pen can stay on pretty well, though I wish it could be shoved in an inside slot. Overall, the typing has a great feel, the touchpad is in a good spot that my wrist doesn’t get in the way, and the screen is sensitive enough for my tastes.

Oh, and the included pen is great! I do have trouble with the fingerprint reader, but that might be because I rock climb and my finger print gets destroyed every couple days. Today it’s working fine.

Thanks.

This is only my second week of owning and using my new HP Pavilion x360 but I am already thoroughly pleased and impressed by the combination of performance and portability. I have gotten exceptional use out of the laptop, which I am using to write this review currently.

I recommend that if you’re looking into the Pavilion line you spring for at least an i5 processor, just for the enhanced Iris Xe graphics. I also recommend you include an HP pen instead of taking the chance on a third-party pen working correctly with the touch display.

I expected better graphics performance but haven’t been able to verify how much juice the chip is getting and recognize that as an early adopter the Iris graphics should get better with time to a point.

That said I can play the games I most enjoy with ease, Fortnite, Skyrim, Magic the Gathering Arena, things of this nature. I am impressed with keyboard despite it being a simple chicklet style, it is enjoyable to type on for extended periods and the raised effect adds to the comfort level.

Battery performance is acceptable for what I am using the laptop for, which is primarily light gaming and multimedia use. I have yet to use it for much creativity but am looking forward to getting better acquainted with the included pen.

I am also quite happy with the deal I was offered on 3 years of extended protection through HP.

I bought this from Costco several years ago. I do not recommend this laptop. The fan is always on at full blast, when you shut down/hibernate/sleep, it only actually goes off 2% of the time. Nearly all other times the screen goes dark but the computer just remains on with no way to get it back without doing a hard shutdown by holding down the power button (I’ve had to do this well over 100 times since I’ve had it).

Sometimes the laptop just restarts out of nowhere. This is not a common occurrence but it happened recently and was extremely frustrating, as I typed a whole note to myself out and hadn’t saved it yet.

The laptop itself when it works is great, though. Touchscreen works great, speed is great too. I should note that I had a newer HP printer as well. All the bells and whistles, great interface, mobile, everything was easy EXCEPT it would lose connection if idle for a while, so I had to constantly restart the printer.

I no longer recommend HP products at all, it is just not worth the hassle later. My mom needed a new laptop, had her eye on an HP, and I just couldn’t recommend it. I ended up recommending a Dell and honestly she loves it and hasn’t had a problem yet (and she always has problems with her PC.

even though she’s usually the problem :)).

Wow, I thought I’d checked the reviews well, before ordering this. Apparently not. It’s the newest Windows 11, which is no improvement from the going 10. The screen resolution is terrible and slightly pixilated like an old Windows 93, instead of sharp and clear.

You have to dig around the weird-looking bottom icons just to find the settings. And then dig around those just to adjust the res, sound, etc. Annoying as heck. I bought it as a fresh start my current Windows 10 laptops, but it STILL copied everything over because of the idiot OneDrive default, which was not fun.

If I’d wanted all 4K files copied over, I would’ve manually done that myself! The settings are a pain to adjust because I hate Edge. It just doesn’t perform like Chrome. So I had to ‘fight’ to get it to default Chrome.

But Outlook kept opening in Edge anyway. Just an all over annoying pain in the butt. I returned and will look for a Windows 10.

I knew I shouldn’t have relied on the mobile ratings when I ordered. A terrible windows 11. Right out of the box, Cortana was so loud at the startup, it could have woke the neighbors. Then it IMMEDIATELY connected AND downloaded OneDrive files instead of ASKING.

So instead of a clean boot, I had to ‘wait’ for 8K online-only files to download as ghost files, which became a waste of time. The desktop icons are horribly pixelated, like old windows 93. And ISL kept defaulting to Edge (which I hate) instead allowing me to access Chrome.

Settings are all reallocated, and difficult to navigate. A big fat NO.

I bought this a couple of weeks ago due to the poor quality of my previous HP. It was hard plastic with poor hinges. I had bought that computer almost 7 years ago (August 3, 2015). Computer set on the desk and was only used there.

Hinges broke and plastic constructure broke so that computer could not be charged. I went to Office Depot to buy a new computer and ended up buying another HP but this one is aluminum so hopefully, it will last longer.

I really like this computer for lightweight work. I bought it mostly to take with me to restaurants or libraries etc. because it’s cheap enough I’m not worried about spilling drinks on it, or someone swiping it.

I didn’t even bother trying Windows on it because Windows is not my favorite. I however did put Linux Mint 20. 3 on it (non-Edge version), with encrypted LUKS storage. All the hardware is recognized out of the box, including the WiFi and Bluetooth.

I reduced the amount of swappiness and switched the /tmp and /var/tmp filesystems to use the “tmpfs” to reduce the amount of churn on the eMMC storage. There are only a few oddities so far: the keyboard occasionally will rapid-fire when you type a key.

Sometimes have to restart the Bluetooth service. Also the trackpad sometimes just fails to respond. These are most likely Linux driver/firmware issues with this particular hardware most likely because it’s cheap bottom feeder stuff.

Sometimes “dmesg” shows some weird errors for ACPI and other subsystems. Sometimes it gets stuck in the LUKS unlock boot-up, requiring a Ctrl-Alt-Delete. But I can work with these quirks. The battery life is PHENOMENAL, which it should be with a 6 watt CPU.

The screen is actually really good, too. And the speakers are rather good for this price-point.

Overall I would rate this an excellent buy. Getting the core I5 processor, 8 gig of RAM and the SSD were a big plus. The only thing this is missing, which I overlooked at purchase, was the lack of a backlit keyboard.

I had purchased basically this same P. C. from your sister station a couple weeks ago, and it had twice the SSD storage, at 512 gig, the same color, black oil slick, (so cool looking), but only has the core I3 processor, but yes a backlit keyboard, It has.

I did purposely buy both of these, because I do a lot of over the road training classes, and was getting weary of bringing my $4,000 laptop everywhere. These are much less of a loss if something happens.

These are still a really great option for a laptop, because rarely can you ever find them with this battery life, decent performance, 8 gig of RAM an SSD, and also an optical drive. I only gave it four stars, because of my ignorance in not noticing it didn’t have a backlit keyboard, but I feel it should in this price range, since your sister station did offer it.

I’m assuming the price trade off, was the core I3 and the lit keyboard for the one there, and the core I5 with no lit keyboard for this one. Overall, still very pleased with these purchases. For so long, both networks were selling similar laptops, with specs that sounded amazing to the average viewer.

It was never made clear on air however, that these older laptops, with such large storage, usually advertised as 1 or 2 terabyte, were actually a large bottleneck because they were mechanical drives, and on top of that they were at speeds of usually 5,400 RPM, which greatly reduced their performance.

I am so glad the SSD’s are now being sold more common. One last thing, I am noticing some reviews where folks are highly disappointed, because it will not play a DVD in it’s optical drive, and were sending them back because of it.

These will not play DVD’s as shipped, because they are not sold only in the U. S. A. You need to get in and change your region code, which is REGION 1 in the U. S. and Canada. Fixes it every time.

I was able to grab this budget laptop as a deal of the day. I was not expecting a fancy device, so It does its job (web browsing and document editing). At the beginning I found the machine a little slow, but I noticed it was installing all updates in the background.

Now that everything is updated, it is fast and responsive with only 4GB of Ram. The keyboard and the screen are the weakest points of this laptop, but I am connecting it to a 32 inch monitor and I am using a wirelress keyboard and mouse, so I cannot complain.

It comes with one year of MS Office 365. It has only 64GB, but you can expand the memory with a SD card. Also, It comes with windows 11 S mode, but you can easily disable this. (If you do not know there are a lot of video tutorials on youtube).

I marked off 1 egg because this isn’t perfect and almost nothing is absolutely perfect. I have no complaints with newegg or Asus at this time. Though I have only had the laptop for a few weeks. I am trying to give this laptop an honest and thorough review because I was almost discouraged when I did my research into certain things surrounding Asus laptops.

I don’t want that to happen to others and I also want to show a review because there were non on this model here on newegg before I bought this. I started looking for a new laptop when my 8+ year old thinkpad, with gen 1 I7 processor started running at 90c base with roughly 40% cpu usage with only chrome (on home screen) and itunes open.

Some web pages in chrome would pull 100% utilization at times. So, I started to do my research. I read a couple of recent reviews on this computer (dated early November) and decided to take a chance.

My main gaming computer is a desktop with a ryzen 9 5900x and rtx 3070 graphics card, so I don’t need a high end gaming laptop. I wanted a laptop that could do reasonable gaming, 3 usb connectors (type a), decent screen and decent hard drive for this price range.

I decided to go with the amd ryzen version for the base clock speed 3. 2ghz without the need for overclocking and temp management. I dislike the fact that Intel seems to force you to overclock if you want any kind of reasonable speeds and I also heard the 10 and 11 series Intel chips run hot.

I also heard there wasn’t much of a difference between gen 10 and gen 11 on Intel. As said above, temps on this laptop run fine. The keyboard area doesn’t get hot to the touch at all. I wish the 3050 laptop graphics were stronger, but went with this for possible slightly more longevity in the graphics on the 3050 than integrated.

Keep in mind there is apparently no expandability with the ram, so make sure you get a 16gig model at minimum. That is what I did and I am fine with that because as long as everything goes well, I won’t need to upgrade the ram before having to replace the laptop.

Everyone has certain specs they consider must have, the problem with them is that you have to consider price and the fact that the laptop market is all over the place. At time of writing this review, the price difference between 8gig ram and 16gig ram with similar specs seem to be 300+.

Higher resolution screen (2k) 600 more easy, integrated graphics vs 3050, same price. Better 3070 graphics easy 1k more. Overall, if you are looking for the best possible specs for this price range and some kind of middle ground in the current market, This laptop should be on your limited list for consideration and worth a chance.

It took me awhile to appreciate this laptop. I was about to return it because of the battery life and low ram but I will keep it now since those are easy to upgrade :D. I use this laptop for my school and home.

This laptop needs to always be plugged in. Due to the high resolution oled screen, lit keyboard, mx350 gpu, and i7 processor, it uses a lot of battery. Quite frankly, it comes with a measly 46watts-hour battery.

I wish there was a way to upgrade the battery pack or get a extended battery supply for this model. (I’m sure there is) It can play league of legends and valorant on max settings in performance mode.

I was surprised that it was able to run it. While in balance mode it is a little choppy when running those game. When I user bench marked this laptop it came to be as follow: Gaming : 25 % iris xe graphics Desktop: 97 % i71165g7 Workstation: 27% To be honest the Gaming should be at least 45% as this laptop has two gpu that works together.

When testing the mx350 gpu it was at 20%. If you see this laptop on sale again, I would definitely grab it. I got it for $750. 00 us dollars. Also I’m sure a lot of people are returning this because of the battery life and ram (easy fix).

Once again If you see this on sale I would grab it. The mx350 combo with iris xe graphics is amazing. It keeps the laptop thin, and you wont have heat issue 3050, 3060, 3070, 3080 will generate. Once again newegg should hire me.

Overall this laptop is for those who have a gaming desktop already and is looking for something powerful and can handle minimal gaming (mainly export games).

I bought this to replace my aging Macbook Pro, circa 2011. I had recently built a gaming PC and gotten used to such fast loading speeds and performance. This laptop has similar specs to my gaming rig, minus GPU.

For online browsing, shopping, and youtube watching; this thing cant be beat. When I bought this, i knew i wanted fast power up times and the capability to play some reasonable games if I wanted. I am very pleased with the purchase, save for a few quirks.

Coming from a macbook pro, I miss the feel of a metal body. I have dropped my macbook from chest height and, after a reboot, had no issues. I would not trust this laptop with a similar drop. I am also not impressed with the quality of speakers included with this laptop.

the speakers are VERY mid heavy. I do not enjoy listening to music on this laptop what so ever, though voice heavy videos are okay. And lastly, and my biggest complaint, the touchpad needs some refinement.

Often times, it registers gestures that I am not doing. As I scroll through a web page, it will zoom in and minimize windows when I am not doing any sort of gesture. I never had issues like that with my macbook.

Overall, for the price, they MUST fix the touchpad issue. It is an inconvenience for simple web browsing, it has to be a major pain for something mouse involved, like any gaming or photo alterations.

A speaker upgrade would be nice, but a cheap pair of headphones can also fix the issue. All in all, its a great laptop for a great price for basic computing, with power available if needed.

Older laptop died and had to get a new laptop. Found some potentials online, but delivery wasn’t until Christmas (yikes). Decided to go to local Staples just to see what they have in-stock and found this laptop.

It met all my needs, and was on sales as well. Setup was easy enough (I’ve done enough new computer setups to know what to expect). During setup, lots of Windows 10 updates (as expected); but what surprised me was being asked if I wanted Windows 11.

As this is a “new” computer, I felt it was safe to do (before I started adding my apps and such). Installation of Windows 11 went smoothly. The interface in Windows 11 is definitely a learning curve (taskbar on the bottom, etc.

), but it soon gets into your muscle memory and isn’t such a bother. Loaded my apps and all went well. The SSD memory is amazingly fast (this is new to me). Boot time (from cold boot and from hibernate) are less than 5 seconds (or so it seems).

Apps load very fast, so I can get thru my work without any time lag. I like the bigger screen as I can see more of my documents at a time. I did have to fiddle with the zoom level as the laptop’s native screen resolution is set for watching streaming videos instead of documents.

I recently bought an HP 14 i3 (HP 14s-dq2008ni) Laptop for myself. Times are tough and times are hard but I thought to myself “why not buy something nice for yourself? If you do not do it, who will?” I went out, got it and I love it.

I initially bought the laptop for work purposes but I also watch my films and listen to music on it and it works well for both work and leisure. It also works beautifully with my wifi connection. I did not really require such a premium laptop but I realised that the previous one I owned was your basic Intel Celeron laptop which was much slower.

A Core i3 is much faster and I love that about my laptop. What I did in the beginning was, I went to all sorts of shops to educate myself so that I make an informed decision and I decided to settle with this one.

There is a whole range of other premium HP laptops on the market but this one was perfect for me as a start up. And it also has Windows 11. I highly recommend it, you will love it.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the features of this model laptop. This review is for model 15-eh0090wm. It has never had a backlit keyboard, a 1TB 128 GB SSD, etc. The Ryzen 4500U processor is significantly faster than others that are commonly available in this price range, such as the Intel i5 1035G1, and this laptop offers a 512 GB SSD storage instead of the typical 256 GB SSD that can leave some users starving for more room.

All the USB ports are high speed instead of mix of standard and high speed. This boost in performance for the price range is what drew me to this model. Good keyboard, good tactile feel, not mushy and allow fast typing with confidence.

I removed it from the box and set it up quickly with no issues. Have been using it daily for the last 2 weeks, no issues whatsoever. The only complaint, and it’s not just this model – a lot of the laptops these days come with a 1 piece touchpad with integrated mouse left and right buttons.

I like the models that have a touchpad, but a separate set of mouse key buttons at the base that are not part of the touchpad, left and right and requires a specific action to click the buttons without ambiguity.

If you’re using a laptop as a business computer, and you’re conducting important or costly transactions, the last thing you want is an accidental mouse click that could cause a premature click of approval, purchase or agreement or unintended dollar amount, and the integrated mouse keys can tend to increase the possibility of that kind of an accident.

However, it’s become increasingly difficult to find laptops built like this for business users to the point that they can be a rare find. As it is, you can configure the touchpad on this laptop to prevent some actions occurring that helps, and unless I’m in a motel room or business conference, I often use a wireless mouse and keyboard at work and home that negates the disgusting integrated touchpad risks.

This is a solid laptop with solid specs and I have almost no complaints. It’s super quick. Starts up and shuts down in about 2-3 seconds. According to another reviewer, contrary to the product description, the ram is upgradeable.

I haven’t done that myself yet as it gets the job done flawlessly. I ran some benchmarks and it exceeded my expectations. The audio is phenomenal. The camera quality is great. I was able to score a very tiny webcam cover from Amazon.

The bezels are extremely thin so it was king of a mission to find a webcam cover to fit the tiny bezel. On Amazon: Cimkiz Webcam Cover Slide 0. 022in Ultra Thin Metal Magnet I purchased this as an upgrade from my surface pro 3 and I have to admit that I do miss the convenience of the backlit keyboard.

It’s definitely not a deal breaker, but it’s something to note. It’s a bit of a challenge to see the keys in darkness even with the screen light. With that being said, I ordered reflective stickers to throw onto the keyboard and I’m hoping that will fix that “issue” for me.

Other than that, it’s been powering through my many chrome tabs as well as photo editing software and running music in the background, flawlessly. It does get a little warm and the fan comes on when it’s working hard but it’s not hot and the fan isn’t insanely loud either.

Oh and battery life has been amazing so far.

This is an excellent laptop. I just set it up with no issues. Loads content very fast. If you set sceen to max brightness and set size to 125%, it matches the quality of the other 1080p screens that I own even at this lower screen resolution.

The unit is beautiful and seems to be sturdy and well constructed. Sound quality is very good at max setting in a 13×30 foot room. Keyboard response is great. I purchased this pc on the daily deal for $199.

99. I got another $20 credit because unit was not well packaged with box being crushed even though unit performs perfectly upon setup after contact by phone with customer service expressing my concerns, Best Buy needs to package items better for shipment.

Only negative is that HP should have made this with black keys with whiite lettering as the gray keys with white lettering make identifying keys difficult without backlit keyboard even though the look is aesthetically pleasing.

Have not checked battery life yet, If it gets around 9 hours as advertised, actually OK.

I’ve been watching this laptop for some time as I was looking for a new lightweight machine to travel with that would handle simple tasks (email, web surfing, photo organization, etc. ). I wasn’t 100% sold, but when it dropped to $200 for a Deal of the Day, I had to grab one.

I must say that so far, I am very pleased with its performance. The keys have a nice feel when typing, the touch pad is very smooth, and the screen is the perfect size. I’m enjoying the SD memory card port; my previous laptop had a microSD typically found in the $200 range laptops, which required me to travel with an adapter.

However, the two things that I’m most excited about: the SSD and the RAM. The SSD, unlike eMMC, can be swapped out at some point in the future (for now the 128GB will do the job). As for the memory, I am fine with 8gb; makes for a snappy Win11 experience, but I was ecstatic to learn that this was expandable to a max of 16gb (again, future upgrade).

Given its price, current performance AND the capacity for future upgrades makes this HP laptop an excellent buy. Get one!.

Pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Wanted something better than a Chromebook but not as expensive as a laptop. For $250, this checks the boxes. It’s better than some of the similarly priced Celeron cpus and it’s got Windows which I prefer to ChromeOS.

Plus it means that you should be able to install Linux as well. Another plus is 8gb ram on one stick with another slot open. I don’t know why they sell Windows systems with 4gb of ram. It’s an awful choice especially with no upgradable systems.

I suppose it’s just cashing in on the general public really not knowing much about hardware. Anyway, good for basic productivity, my only knock is it’s definitely not an IPS screen as the specifications state.

This is the second laptop I’ve purchased from Best Buy with incorrect specs. I ended up returning the last one because of it. There should be some sort of discount for the inconvenience and incorrect advertising.

Pros: Slim, lightweight design. Boot time, SSD speed. General appearance. When it is actually working, it’s great. Cons: From day one, the laptop would freeze and then crash at least once a day. A litany of software and hardware errors was reported in reliability manager.

Nothing (updates, BIOS upgrades, Windows refresh) would fix the problems so the laptop was returned after only a week of use.

I bought this about a month ago. Shipping was fast. Well packaged. But the real magic was when i started using it for school. I love the fact I can grab this as a tablet and go read my text that i need to.

Then when i need to type up a project, snap into laptop kode and away we go. Love this machine and will have lots of use from it in the coming years.

I bought this about 2 months back a little bit for work (mostly large spreadsheets and such) and also to be able to develop my photos easier on the go rather than having to wait till I get home. Some patience is required for more complicated features in programs but overall, fantastic and easy to use.

Tablet mode comes in really handy also.