Quite a few years back I purchased a HP laptop. It was one of their top of the line 17 inch glossy screen and also had four cores. Not much of an achievement now but back then it was the bee’s knee’s.
My biggest problem for the first two years was a few issues with the DVD drive. I think there was some problems with the ethernet port but as I always used wireless that didn’t bother me so much. It was a beautifully crafted case, great speakers lots of I/O … it was nice.
I was hoping to hold on to this one for a long time but about two days before the warrenty expired I had some problems with the batteries and then about a month later my laptop would start and within a minute it would power off. I did not know of any repair shops so I ended up dumping it on ebay for a few bucks. I had always expected the screen/keyboard/ports to stop working. The plan was when that happened this computer would have migrated to the desktop for light webbrowsing.
Deep in my heart I know HP did not plan for the computer to die 30 days after the warrenty but it is pretty hard to convince yourself of that when you get the unexpected bill of a new laptop … but i digress.
My aunt needed a computer on a budget and so I spent hours on Amazon to find one. I don’t purchase from Amazon because they are the best nor the kindest to their employees but i do use their site to read the comments from actual purchasers. In that sense it is possible to find a lot of people who were willing to comment to find out the true weaknesses of any one product.
The only problem is you need to take the reviews with a grain of salt. I have seen some where people are unhappy by the silliest things.
I didn’t like the color so i sent it back
I guess if they didn’t like a black 10/100 switch they shouldn’t have purchased a black switch. I also guess it is human nature that if you purchase something and are happy you might be less inclined to write a review as compared to really upset if a phone charger blows up your phone.
Eventually you could see that there was no laptop that had only satisfied purchasers so I went with a name brand for my aunt.
HP Pavillion Gaming laptop
The specs themselves would be nice enough for light gaming and pretty much anything else.
- 16 gb ram
- i5 2.5 ghz 4 core 8 threads
- 500gb ssd
- 15″ screen
- card reader
- ethernet
- NVidea Geforce 1650 Ti
- less than 1000 Eur
Pretty much as you would expect it boots up within seconds with no hard disk noise. My aunt does not generate enough of a load that we should expect any loud fans and I did not encounter any difficulties during install.
I guess I have to get along with the times and come to grips that CD’s and DVD’s are no longer in fashion. I did use the old DVD drive on the old laptop during the “data move” of 2021. It was helpful hopefully this lack of DVD won’t be a problem in the future.
The new laptop does not have VGA nor does that really bother me, yet what might have been nice would be a third USB port. This might be an unique situation where I don’t have a docking station and I prefer mice and keyboards. Two USB ports work great for one mouse one keyboard but it does leave you scratching your head where to put the USB stick when copying data.
Windows Install
Windows 10 install, especially compared previous windows versions, installs without much fuss and was pretty quick. I was surprised how painless the process is. That isn’t to suggest that Microsoft does not try to setup monitors for your every move. One of my favorite settings was about “improving the product”. If I understood the question and the answer, you had the choice of sending some information if difficulties occurred but you could opt in to sending a lot more info. No option of opting out and just living with a PC that occasionally had problems. I guess if I trusted major international corporations would guard my information and not ask for more than is necessary I might feel differently.
I only have used this laptop for a few minutes and I will probably not touch it again after it is delivered but I did encounter a bit of big brother knows better than you. I managed to set the default PDF viewer to Adobe Acrobat but I was surprised, and irritated, when downloading a PDF. Edge would display the file, but because they “knew better” they would offer the option at the top of the browser to set Edge as my PDF viewer.
It is beyond me why Microsoft even cares how I look at PDF’s. I would have thought that after attempting to move the world to XPS files they might be a bit more humble on this point.
Summary
I have held my grudge with HP for long enough. I cannot say how long this laptop will last but it is nice to look at, fast, and reasonably light. The only think I would really want would be one more USB port.
