Hp Laptop Notebook 15 Review – HP Notebook 15-ac121nr, surely is a good-looking 15-inch notebook with a full-HD screen and above-average battery life, but the keyboard could be more comfortable. The $649 laptop falls flat in a couple of areas, but overall, it’s a good value.
HP laptop notebook 15 has a sharp 1080p display for enjoying flicks and photos, a big 1TB hard drive for all of your files and an attractive chassis that looks good on your desk. The $649 laptop falls flat in a couple of areas, but overall, it’s a good value.
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Design
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this cheap laptop feels really, well, cheap. It’s made of black plastic, and the ribbed lid with HP’s logo has a lot of flex when you press down. Lifting the lid reveals the 15.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display; an island-style keyboard with a number pad; and a black deck with some racing stripes. The black plastic edges around the deck are sharper than I expected, which caused me some trouble while typing (see below).
At 4.6 pounds and 15.1 x 10 x 1 inches, it’s an average size for a budget 15-incher. The Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM is 5 pounds and 15 x 10.2 x 1.2 inches. The 14-inch Dell Inspiron 14 3000 is 3.5 pounds and 13.6 x 9.6 x 0.9 inches.
The left side of the laptop features an Ethernet jack, an HDMI output, a headphone jack and a pair of USB 2.0 ports. On the right are a USB 3.0 port, an SD card reader and a DVD drive.
Display
Dim and dull is the name of the game with the HP Notebook 15’s 15.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display. When I watched a trailer for The Big Sick in 1080p, I couldn’t make out most of the characters’ facial features in a dark room, and a scene in a hospital was blown out by light coming in from the windows. The people’s blue and red shirts were all muted.
The HP Notebook covered just 70 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is far short of the 94 percent average for mainstream notebooks. The Inspiron and Aspire were both more vivid at 81 percent and 159 percent, respectively.
It has a Delta-E score of 1.3 (0 is ideal), so its colors are more accurate than some competitors. The average is 2.1, while the Inspiron (3.4) and Aspire E (6.2) were way less precise.
The HP laptop’s display is dim at just 174 nits, but it’s brighter than the 135-nit disappointment on the Inspiron. The average is a more luminous 277 nits, and the Acer measured 215 nits.
Keyboard and Touchpad
I typed at my usual 107 words per minute on the HP Notebook 15’s keyboard, but it wasn’t enjoyable. The keys are shallow with just 1.2 millimeters of travel and 71 grams of force required to press, and the cheap plastic gave them a hollow feel. The edge of the palm rest is sharp and digs into your arms if you aren’t careful.
The touchpad feels plasticky and cheap, but it suffices. I used it to navigate Windows 10 without any problems, though some multitouch gestures, like activating Cortana with three fingers, took a few tries.
Audio
For a cheap notebook, HP’s speakers were actually pretty decent. When I listened to “Waving Through a Window,” from the soundtrack to “Dear Evan Hansen,” Ben Platt’s vocals were clear and loud enough to fill our small conference room.
While the violins were also clear, the bass and the rest of the orchestra were quite soft. In the DTS Audio Control app, there are options to focus on voice or movie playback, but I was perfectly happy leaving it alone in the default music mode.
Performance
With its 2-GHz AMD A6-7310 CPU, Radeon R4 Graphics, 4GB of RAM and 500GB, 5,400-rpm HDD, the Notebook 15 isn’t exactly the working person’s computer. In my testing, it occasionally stuttered just trying to open the file manager, and it couldn’t consistently keep up with my typing on the 10fastfingers.com typing test. I had 10 tabs open in Google Chrome when I started seeing lag when switching between them.
It also doesn’t use 802.11ac, the latest Wi-Fi standard, so you won’t get the fastest internet speeds.
The Notebook notched a score of 3,291 on the Geekbench 4 overall performance test, which beat the Inspiron (1,807, Intel Celeron N3060), but was not as good as the Aspire (5,408, Intel Core i3-7100U) or the category average (10,897).
It took the computer 2 minutes and 7seconds to copy 4.97GB of mixed-media files, a rate of 40.1MBps. The Inspiron (27.9MBps) and the Aspire (36.6MBps) were both faster. The average mainstream notebook is much faster at 210.5Mbps.
It took a whopping 11 minutes and 40 seconds for HP’s laptop to pair 20,000 names and addresses in our OpenOffice spreadsheet macro. The Inspiron was even slower (13:33), but the Aspire took just 5:14. The average mainstream laptop takes only 3:58.
Battery Life
Keep the Notebook 15 near a charger at all times. It lasted for just 3 hours and 36 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which continuously browses the web over Wi-Fi. The mainstream average is 6:51, which the Inspiron (9:01) and Aspire (8:16) both exceeded.
Webcam
What a mess. The 640 x 360 webcam takes blurry, pixelated images that aren’t even suitable for Skyping with a friend. In a shot I took at my desk, I appeared so blurry and pixelated that I had to make sure that there was no Cling Wrap over the camera. The lights behind me were all blown out, and colors weren’t nearly as vivid as they appeared in real life.
Software and Warranty
Unfortunately, you’ll spend a bit of time if you want to uninstall all the prepackaged bloatware on the Notebook 15. The junk includes McAfee LiveSafe, WildTangent Games, Simple Mahjong and shortcuts for Amazon.com and Priceline.com, among others. That’s on top of stuff all Windows 10 machines make you deal with, such as Netflix, Twitter, Candy Crush: Soda Saga and Royal Revolt 2.
HP does include some useful utilities, though. Amateur videographers may appreciate the CyberLink suite of video-editing tools, while HP Orbit pairs your laptop and smartphone for file sharing. The pre-loaded Dropbox app gives you 25GB of space for a year if you sign in on the laptop.
HP Sells the Notebook 15-ba009dx with a one-year warranty. See how the company did on our Best and Worst Brands ranking and tech support showdown.
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