Well for lack of a better 17" option I bought one.
It is most definitely better than the previous Toshiba, but it cost twice as much too, so..
I think it's a $700 laptop, shame it cost a grand.
Screen is ok, 1080p, (useless)touch works what little I tried it, no complaints about color or viewing angle (top down is worst). Shiny screen, good range of bright to dim. Nothing amazing but not glairingly bad thus far. Think I read it's an LG made panel.
Has Beats audio with a tiny woofer in the lower chassis. Volume and fullness is alright, screamingly better than that embarissing crap Toshiba put in the previously mentioned Satalite. Wife has a mid 12 Macbook Pro and it's in that league but the EQ seems wonky on some things. I'm not embarressed to suggest we watch a movie on this instead of hers now though. Headphone is surpringly good on my cheap but good on-ear MEElectronics HT-21, I have a more substantial set of over-hear closed back guys I'll try later. It's not my Schiit stack but it's a lot better than I expected, the beats stuff is bass and trebble heavy as you'd expect, but it's not bad sounding.
Keyboard is useable, more flex than I'd prefer (none), the backlight is on/off no adjustment, but key presses are pretty distinct. There is no indicator for numlock being on or off which is.. weird. Key shape and placement isn't anything bizaar so that's a plus. It's still not even as good as my five year old $400(new) Acer. I don't like chicklit or island or whatever they call these keybaords they insist on putting on everything now. Nor do I understand the two inches of dead space to each side of the keyboard. Useable.
Trackpad, again light years better than the Toshiba, and one reason I didn't buy an Inspirion was the page after page after page of people screaming about the bad touchpad on them too. HP made it overly wide and put two slightly different textured areas on the L and R side for Win8 functions. It's crap imo, thankfully it's still Synaptics and pretty configurable. When I turned off that side swyipe in Win8 stuff it acts like a normal touchpad now. Little clacky toward the bottom where it moves for physical L or R click presses, but it's.. Useable. Only thing of note is it sometimes stops in mid cursor movement, but I strongly suspect it's due to disk thrashing from that ungodly slow hard drive. Will update if it's more of an issue after the SSD.
The 1tb HGST 5400prm drive is the slowest, loudest lappy spinny disk drive I have seen in a long, long time. It would ruin this laptop if it wasn't scheduled to be replaced with an SSD before I ever brought it home.
The hard drive light(which it actually has!) stayed lit solid for the first FIVE HOURS the computer was on. Yes, windows update, but still. It just sat there, running away, on and on and on. It was like 1995 again.
I mean it's just, so slow and loud. My wife asked from across the room what that noise was. I don't think there is anything wrong with it and no doubt a fresh install of W8 would help some, but still. Rubbage. Crying shame for a grand they can't put an SSD in there. Speaking of which..
There is in theory from the service manual an MSATA port on this thing. I have read some reports that one can't boot from the MSATA with a regular SATA drive installed at the same time. I've got a post in on the HP support forum to see if anyone knows. Hopefully I'll be able to stick an MSATA SSD in it to run the OS from and keep the big slow 1tb spinny disk for storage. That'd be a neat setup. Failing that, I have a 500gig Evo I just bought for the Toshiba that'll go in there. Film at eleven whenever that happens.
I've also un-fanboi'd myself some I guess, not only does this guy sport an Intel CPU, but a dedicated NV GPU as well. I fired up Borderlands2 briefly with HwInfo64 running just to make sure it kicked in and worked, seemed to.
I never got around to trying to game on the Toshiba which was an R5 of some sort and an A8-6410, but in general windows use it felt the same. I tried to buy AMD just because it'd be good enough and they proboboly need the money more than Intel, but hey. Stuffs gotta work. I don't plan on gaming on this but it's nice that it's there. I'd have rather saved a few bucks and it not be but whatever.
It came with 12gb of mem, which is weird and kinda halfassed.
I don't like missmatched memory. That seems to be a thing, the Toshiba had 6gb.
Ordered 16gig of cas9 ram, the 4gig in here convienently matches one I have laying around already so it'll go in the Wifes MBP, other one is FS.
I couldn't find an exact mate to the 8gb stick in this thing, some Adata cas11 chip, it'll probly end up on ebay as I imagine there is someone else out there that wants to have two matching sticks as well.
Fair bit of bloatware, way more than the barebones Toshiba.
The HP update/assist software is actually pretty decent, it updated the bios
and a bunch of other stuff pretty painlessly. The NV software updated itself too. Speaking of the bios, I'm sure it's UEFI, but it's a plain old arrow key driven interface. It's OK, just surprised to see. Next to no options as usual, which is fine on a laptop I guess.
The case is alright, really would prefer black but whatever. It's all plastic far as I can tell but it really really wants you to think it's not.
I wouldn't pay more for alloy or whatever myself after being around Wifes MBP(and replacing it's sata cable two months after the warranty went out, and seeing the broken battery mount tabs inside). No objectionable flex, the Toshiba was garbage in that respect. Hinges feel OK, screen isn't wobbling badly enough to annoy me. It's.. a case. Sad they probably spent a lot of effort on something that's completely underwhelming.
Haven't taken it apart yet, but they do have a really good service manual here
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c04434142.pdf
which is one of the reasons I bought the thing. I'm sure HP isn't what they used to be just like everyone else these days, but they do have a pretty well put together service site and docs. That stuff counts over the long haul with me. The Toshiba was fairly easy to get into and swap stuff, and was in fact mostly empty inside. If I find anyting to gripe about when I do the ram and drive I'll edit it. I'm already less than impressed with having to do more than take off an access panel to swap ram/drive though.
As it is, I passed on several possibly better machines because the battery was not readily removeable. I get why, but still, duh, it's a laptop. Four hour battery, eight hour workday. Cmon guys...
Cooling fan can get really loud but has not needed to thus far, 60C in brief gaming, it's hanging out around 48C with 15% average usage across both cores, streaming google music basically and whatever else HP has running in the background. I don't anticipate any annoyance from heat or fan.
The power and LAN plug are on the left, the DVD drive on the right, which is an annoyance if one had the laptop to the left on a desk like I usually do.
It took 6 DVD's to make the recovery disks. 6.
Overall I'm really disappointed in this round of laptop buying compared to the previous two or three in years past. I buy one about every 5 years or so. Frankly I think a $400 laptop was a lot nicer overall last time than what a $400 laptop is now. This has been a giant time wasting expensive pita and no fun at all. Lot of gimmicks and BS, persistent last-decade problems, lot of really, really dump design and hardware decisions. Sure they are faster, but that's a given. Fast isn't enough, it's 2014 and my first laptop had a trackball built in. No, actually it had a flip up monochrome screen and weighted like 40lbs, it still worked last time I checked. I'm going to be in this one for what is, to me, a TON of money for what is still a "cheap" laptop. In hindsight I should have bought a higher end used one but with stuff like this at this point in my life I like the comfort of a warranty and knowing any wear I put on it is from me. Also it was supposed to be set up and ready to go by last week for some new software I'm getting started with at work. That didn't happen thanks to Toshibas incompetence but expediency was a factor in buying new/local.
Hopefully I plan better and think further and about this experience next time.
Credit to Best Buy for not giving me grief about swapping them out too.
