Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?
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I'm looking for a small low-end laptop with great battery life that can run windows or linux.
Right now I'm looking at HP's Probook x360 11 G5. It's physically like a small chromebook but has a real BIOS/UEFI and SSD drive and comes with windows 10. It has a 11.6" touchscreen on 360 degree hinge.
Does anyone have experience with these laptops? They seem to be common in education.
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I'm mostly interested how they hold up, build quality and how the touchscreen performs.
Computing performance is low-end but that is to be expected.
The ones I'm looking at have Intel N5030 (4 cores @ 1.1Ghz to 3.1Ghz), 4GB RAM, 128GB M2 SSD.I don't have much experience with HP laptops to be honest so don't know how they compare to other brands.
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@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
Probook x360 11 G5
I love HP laptops, and Probooks are what I generally buy for my staff - but a celeron - man, I'd almost rather gut myself than use that, at least in the past - they were so bad = slow!
But at least it's not an A series AMD, that = kill me instead of being forced to use the device.
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@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
Probook x360 11 G5
I love HP laptops, and Probooks are what I generally buy for my staff - but a celeron - man, I'd almost rather gut myself than use that, at least in the past - they were so bad = slow!
But at least it's not an A series AMD, that = kill me instead of being forced to use the device.
Hey, it's not a Celeron, it's a PENTIUM SILVER!
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@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
Probook x360 11 G5
I love HP laptops, and Probooks are what I generally buy for my staff - but a celeron - man, I'd almost rather gut myself than use that, at least in the past - they were so bad = slow!
But at least it's not an A series AMD, that = kill me instead of being forced to use the device.
Hey, it's not a Celeron, it's a PENTIUM SILVER!
oh man, likely even worse... I was reading from HP's site... I'm sure they have many different models of this.
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@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
Probook x360 11 G5
I love HP laptops, and Probooks are what I generally buy for my staff - but a celeron - man, I'd almost rather gut myself than use that, at least in the past - they were so bad = slow!
But at least it's not an A series AMD, that = kill me instead of being forced to use the device.
Hey, it's not a Celeron, it's a PENTIUM SILVER!
oh man, likely even worse... I was reading from HP's site... I'm sure they have many different models of this.
I'll test what the performance is like. Looking at benchmarks it's should be on par with a laptop from five, six years ago running an i5.
The primary objective though is great battery life. It's not going to be a daily driver.
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I'm using a 15" Hp notebook with touch screen
it works well, and I haven't had many issues with it.
Hope this helps
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I just got an ASUS VivoBook Flip 14 two weeks ago for my parents. The Celeron N4020 in it is not very fast, but it is light years ahead of the things @Dashrender is talking about. Thankfully those terri-bad CPUs are a thing of the past now. Performance isn't great, but it's not bad, and the touchscreen is nice.
I've had an HP Chromebook with the 360 degree hinge, and it's been a workhorse that goes for two full days of heavy usage on a single charge. For everyday tasks, that HP @Pete-S listed would be just fine.
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@travisdh1 said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
I just got an ASUS VivoBook Flip 14 two weeks ago for my parents. The Celeron N4020 in it is not very fast, but it is light years ahead of the things @Dashrender is talking about. Thankfully those terri-bad CPUs are a thing of the past now. Performance isn't great, but it's not bad, and the touchscreen is nice.
I've had an HP Chromebook with the 360 degree hinge, and it's been a workhorse that goes for two full days of heavy usage on a single charge. For everyday tasks, that HP @Pete-S listed would be just fine.
Sounds good!
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@travisdh1 said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
I just got an ASUS VivoBook Flip 14 two weeks ago for my parents. The Celeron N4020 in it is not very fast, but it is light years ahead of the things @Dashrender is talking about. Thankfully those terri-bad CPUs are a thing of the past now. Performance isn't great, but it's not bad, and the touchscreen is nice.
I got the HP Probook 11 G5 now and I can verify that the performance is OK (on Windows 10 Pro). While it's not very fast, it's very usable. Compared to something like a Raspberry Pi 4 it's much faster.
To put it through it's paces I connected it to a large 4K monitor, keyboard and mouse.
It would work as a daily office computer for someone that isn't a superuser and doesn't run any demanding applications - if you remove the windows 10 bloat first. Firefox is too slow for it but Chrome does a good job.
The model I have has the N5030 CPU which has 4 cores compared to the N4020 which has two cores so it's probably 50-75% faster. The N5030 has a 6W TDP so I expect battery life to be good.
My model only has 4GB RAM and 128GB NVMe SSDs but after I removed all crap in Windows 10 it's hovering at 2,4GB with a couple of webapps open and a couple of windows. Right now there is roughly 80 GB of free space as well.
All in all it looks like these latest generation low power Intel CPUs are perfectly usable for what they are. I'm pleasantly surprised.
While performance was better than I expected and build quality was good I was a little disappointed at the viewing angles and brightness of the display. While it says IPS panel in the specs, it doesn't look like one. Touchscreen itself works great though.
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@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
It would work as a daily office computer for someone that isn't a superuser and doesn't run any demanding applications - if you remove the windows 10 bloat first. Firefox is too slow for it but Chrome does a good job.
This is just sad. I'm on a 7 year old i5-4570 that runs Firefox just fine. Why the hell would anyone want to run on something new that can't fun FF worth a shit? I honestly can't believe normal users would really find that acceptable. Perhaps if they use the simplest of websites and that's all, then maybe...
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@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
It would work as a daily office computer for someone that isn't a superuser and doesn't run any demanding applications - if you remove the windows 10 bloat first. Firefox is too slow for it but Chrome does a good job.
This is just sad. I'm on a 7 year old i5-4570 that runs Firefox just fine. Why the hell would anyone want to run on something new that can't fun FF worth a shit? I honestly can't believe normal users would really find that acceptable. Perhaps if they use the simplest of websites and that's all, then maybe...
It's business, not fun. If you can decide on chrome as your standard browser and every webpage / app the user needs runs fine on it on the hardware you picked, what is the problem?
It's the job of IT to not buy stuff that is not needed.
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@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
It would work as a daily office computer for someone that isn't a superuser and doesn't run any demanding applications - if you remove the windows 10 bloat first. Firefox is too slow for it but Chrome does a good job.
This is just sad. I'm on a 7 year old i5-4570 that runs Firefox just fine. Why the hell would anyone want to run on something new that can't fun FF worth a shit? I honestly can't believe normal users would really find that acceptable. Perhaps if they use the simplest of websites and that's all, then maybe...
It's business, not fun. If you can decide on chrome as your standard browser and every webpage / app the user needs runs fine on it on the hardware you picked, what is the problem?
It's the job of IT to not buy stuff that is not needed.
I suppose - without actually trying it myself, I couldn't say if I consider it laggy to the point users would complain. User satisfaction is definitely a soft point that we need/should consider in these things.
Though, if it just barely makes the grade today, how long do you expect that to last? updates could make those same site unbearable tomorrow.
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@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
It would work as a daily office computer for someone that isn't a superuser and doesn't run any demanding applications - if you remove the windows 10 bloat first. Firefox is too slow for it but Chrome does a good job.
This is just sad. I'm on a 7 year old i5-4570 that runs Firefox just fine. Why the hell would anyone want to run on something new that can't fun FF worth a shit? I honestly can't believe normal users would really find that acceptable. Perhaps if they use the simplest of websites and that's all, then maybe...
It's business, not fun. If you can decide on chrome as your standard browser and every webpage / app the user needs runs fine on it on the hardware you picked, what is the problem?
It's the job of IT to not buy stuff that is not needed.
I suppose - without actually trying it myself, I couldn't say if I consider it laggy to the point users would complain. User satisfaction is definitely a soft point that we need/should consider in these things.
Though, if it just barely makes the grade today, how long do you expect that to last? updates could make those same site unbearable tomorrow.
I guess it would be best to have some kind of test equipment. But I'm comparing to other computers and if I can't notice much of a difference between them then I consider it fine.
On faster computers I don't notice much of a difference between chrome and firefox and actually prefer firefox personally. But in this particular case I'm not sure it's the CPU at fault, it could also have been lack of RAM.
The webpages I tested was single page apps and they are heavy on client side resources.
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I'm with you - I prefer FF. Sadly, our main application here doesn't support FF at all - infact they purposefully block access via FF.
How much RAM are you running in those computers? You mention that might be the issue.
Many of my older machines/laptops have 4 GB and they run just fine with Chrome and Windows 10 Pro - though no one is running FF, so I can't speak to that.
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@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:
On faster computers I don't notice much of a difference between chrome and firefox and actually prefer firefox personally. But in this particular case I'm not sure it's the CPU at fault, it could also have been lack of RAM.
Same here, about the same and tend to use Firefox.
