HP Laptops. Any Good?

[cobra kid]

Afternoon all. I'm looking for a mid range (£300-£400)laptop for general family use. Ideally 1TB storage and 8GB of RAM. There's a few HP ones knocking about with an i5 processor.

Anyone any experience of these??

Cheers.

[bazza white]

New Intel mobile processors coming out so may be worth waiting to either get a new processor or see if old processor laptops get reduced.

I'm struggling to work the new CPUs out so can't help any further

[Jonny_]

My experience of HP laptops for home use is one of bloatware and lousy build quality. The business models are better made, but still loaded with stty bloatware that slows them down horribly.

Personally I'd avoid them and look at Asus, Toshiba or Lenovo instead.

[Condi]

Fine, and no different to anything else really.

Mine is HP, although running a clean install of Windows and a SSD so no bloatware on it and its been fine. Been twice round the world in my backpack which is a pretty good test of build quality!

Had a Lenovo and that was fine as well, tbh they are all made of the same hardware bits, and the software you can change to suit yourself. I would buy on price/processor/memory rather than brand.

[blueg33]

I have HP laptop for work and all the home ones (one for each child and 1 for my wife) are HP so only 1 charger needs to travel.

No issues at all. The business one is an Elitebook and is fairly well abused travelling around the country

[wjwren]

I have a new toshiba L50b24u i7. It was loaded with bloatware but did a fresh install of wine 10 after getting the key. Runs a lot better but the build quality is hard plastic.

[RobinBanks]

HP is fine. Good if anything, I think.

My mother has an HP in the spec and price you describe which she bought at PC World and in my opinion it has a terrible keyboard though, so check stuff like that.

[paulrockliffe]

I've had two HP laptops in the past, both failed within months of going out of warranty. In both cases the failures were known issues with the motherboards, but in both cases HP denied my laptop was affected, even though it clearly was.

Wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.

[jammy_basturd]

I've had one HP laptop in the past, and have family and friends that have had them and all have had hardware faults, from failing hard drives to failing network cards/chips.

At that price point I'd prefer Dell over HP, but my advice would be to always spend over £500 on a laptop, below that it seems they've always cut corners somewhere.

[RobinBanks]

I've had four HPs now (and a Compaq) and I can't recall even one problem apart from one which was related to Windows rather than the hardware.

[blueg33]

Just to expand on reliability. My part of our business has 120 employees all with HP laptops, I have just asked IT what they think. Failure rate is very low, 1 hard drive failure in 5 years, a couple damaged by spilt drinks. My Elitebook is 3 years old and the only issues are software related.

Interestingly, I also look after a jv business thst has 9 employees. They all have macs, two have failed this year.

Edited by blueg33 on Monday 7th September 07:47

[funkyrobot]

Jonny_ said:

My experience of HP laptops for home use is one of bloatware and lousy build quality. The business models are better made, but still loaded with stty bloatware that slows them down horribly.

Personally I'd avoid them and look at Asus, Toshiba or Lenovo instead.

Asus have had issues with screens failing after only a year or so of use. We have also had one at work that had hard drive failure after 2 months.

[cobra kid]

So, in summary, they are both st and amazing in equal measures!

I went and bought a lenovo from John lewis yesterday so got the extra year guarantee with it.

i5, 8GB RAM. I stuck W10 on it straight away and it's absolutely fine. For now.

[TotalControl]

Good call with going down the Lenovo/JL route.

[SwissJonese]

I've had a few as business seem to like purchasing them. The only one that had issue was the higher spec Ultrabook Spectre XT, because everything is sealed so not so easy to replace failed parts like battery. We had a lot of screens damaged on the Spectre's as they are a bit fragile. HP Desktops on the other hand are excellent and had zero issues with any of them but most have been high powered workstations.

If I was buying my own Laptop I would normally go for Toshiba or Lenovo.

[KaraK]

I'd say good but not amazing - we've got a fleet of half a dozen or so here at work and non-PEBKAC related failures are pretty low. Lenovo is another decent shout, but I would say that some of their cheaper models can feel a bit cheaply made if that makes sense so best to try one out before buying

EDIT: Doh.. hadn't seen your latest post OP, glad you got something sorted

[paranoid airbag]

make sure you've checked your Lenovo laptop for malware first.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but even with a clean OS install I'm not sure I'd trust lenovo consumer stuff anymore.

[KillerJim]

I've a fairly new HP laptop, but (as with all computers) you pay for what you get.. This one was £800 and I immediately deleted Windows and stuck Ubuntu on (works fine, everything!) - it's exceptionally quick and has all the horse power I need - I'd say the one's at ~£400 will be underpowered for most things.

[shirt]

I have an elitebook 840 for work. The boot is a tad slow due to all the dross it has to load but other than that it's fine. I do have 16gb of ram and an ssd tho.

What does strike me is how long the battery lasts, light years ahead of the one it replaced yet the whol package is smaller/lighter/sleeker.

[blueg33]

KillerJim said:

I've a fairly new HP laptop, but (as with all computers) you pay for what you get.. This one was £800 and I immediately deleted Windows and stuck Ubuntu on (works fine, everything!) - it's exceptionally quick and has all the horse power I need - I'd say the one's at ~£400 will be underpowered for most things.

I have issues with Ubuntu and HP wireless printers. Never seems to work properly, you can tell the solution is a fudge. Also doesn't work with Road Angel Software or Promap (these don't work in Wine either because of the way USB ports are handled)