I would never buy another hp product. Had too many problems across different arms of their business (laptops, printers, etc.)
I spent about 10 years working in IT and HP won the worst laptop in the world every year. They used to be designed to fail in about 1 to 2 years, depending on the warranty. That was about 10 years ago, but they were such shit back then that I will never buy a HP anything.
Lenovo and Asus used to be rock solid, probably still are.
Same. HP could stand for “heaping pile.”
It’s a barebones one (hence the “Essential”), if your Toshiba laptop was a good spec, that one might honestly be better, if it was slow then this might be an upgrade. All depends on what you need out of a laptop.
Screen is 1366x768 so it will be hard to do much multitasking at all and you can’t view 1080p HD video at full resolution.
For the price in USD? I think it’s not good value. A used corporate surplus laptop would be far better. ~$200 would be a good value price for this spec.
What’s wrong with the old one?
A little bit slow and takes forever to download hospital programs and stuff. Been thinking about it for years and saw the HP Essential and thought it my work. I don’t play games I just watch tv and movies.
might want to consider a reinstall of the OS first, or some linux if you are up to it.
A new laptop, even the best in the world, won’t make your downloads any faster.
I also back what everyone else is saying. Unless of course you can update your current laptop. What have you got? An extra stick of ram and an SSD can make an old laptop feel brand new, especially with an OS reinstall
A new laptop, even the best in the world, won’t make your downloads any faster.
I struggle to make sense of this. Most obviously, network cards have gotten better with time. It obviously depends on what you’re coming from and what you’re changing to, but of course a laptop upgrade could make your downloads faster?
The bandwidth of a network card would generally outclass your internet connection by an order of magnitude.
Gigabits per second network cards have been standard for at least a decade.
And then there’s your wifi too, if applicable, but even that is much faster than your general internet connection, unless you’re far from your router. A new laptop might help you get a better wifi signal, if it had a newer wifi protocol or stronger radio, but that’s also going to depend on your router.
But in front of all of that is going to be your modem. Depending on the quality of your modem that might be a bottleneck.
As far as brands, almost anything in this price range is built as cheaply as possible to MAYBE last the warranty. No brand will be any better than the next until about the $500 mark.
I’d highly recommend buying a 2 year old used laptop, like others have said, an old business grade laptop would work perfect. Better build, better quality, better speed, better everything.
The cheapest framework is nearly five times the OPs link.
While “no laptop” is better than a HP I don’t see this link as helpful as all.
OP, I would check out used markets in this price range. While frameworks are awesome I haven’t seen them being refurbished yet and you regularly have business leasing returns from Lenovo for example that could match your budget.
I bought a $300 HP i5 laptop from Walmart Black Friday sale three years ago, the battery drains when the laptop is supposed to be off, and now the HDMI port, and audio out don’t work, usb solves both these issues. Got the extended warranty for something like $29 for 2 years from HP when the 1 yr warranty ran out, but can’t be without my laptop to send it in for servicing. For $300 it’s been worth it, probably looking for another one sometime later this year. It’s cheap and it won’t last long, but it’s cheap. (*edit: just noticed this offering is an AMD chip, and I don’t fucks with those, so personally, I wouldn’t buy it, but that’s just me)
