When I worked at Best Buy this was the most returned item in the store. It got so bad managers told us to turn customers away from the device to avoid then returns.
One surprising thing to me is the Celeron N4120 is better than the Atom processor. So, it's not the absolute cheapest and most worthless CPU they could put in the HP Stream. Still, I think a person would be better off using a base model iPad. And a person might even find mobile Microsoft office apps in Apple's App store.@@jimmy3951
@@jimmy3951 Not really.The single core performance at that price point plus the fact that it is an x86 and not an ARM makes a massive difference. One: upggradability, 2: choice of OS. Put Kubuntu or any Linux on it and it run a lot lot better.
@@domoncar6782 I'm a huge Linux guy, and yes a system like this will run better with a lighter Linux distro on it like Solus Budgie that's still using X11, and not Wayland for the compositor, but it won't be much better simply because of the EMMC storage which performs worse than most class 10 Micro SD cards, the weak Intel Celeron CPU, & 4GB of slow ram. In fact sitting in my guest room as a backup laptop, I have a old 15.6in(1366X768 720p screen) ASUS laptop I got from e-waste with an Intel Core i3 2310M hyperthreaded dual core that I upgraded to 16GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM(24 bucks), new battery(18 bucks), and 256GB Netac SATA SSD(26 bucks) that performs better than these HP streams when running Manjaro Solus, the only thing I'm missing vs. something like an HP Stream here, is USB 3.0, and USB C, which is not a huge deal breaker in my book for something that cost me 68 bucks to fix up, that again performs better, and can handle multiple Chrome tabs even playing back RUclips, and other content at 720p.
My grandmother uses one of these. These type of laptops are pretty much for 70+ year olds who wants the cheapest laptop they can find and it is the only deciding factor instead of taking performance/specs into consideration, so they can go on FB and don’t care about how many Chrome tabs they can have open or how fast/slow the computer is
I bought an basic Asus for £280 and slap SSD in making it quite capable machine for basic needs like text editing watching Netflix video calls and some old games (intel celeron n4020 1,1 GHz 8GB RAM DDR4 and intel UHD 600 integrated GPU)
I have an ASUS E410 which basically the same specs I got for $100 at MicroCenter, I tossed in a 1TB NVME SSD that cost just as much as the laptop and honestly Linux Mint was this devices savior. I can actually boot Skyrim at 60fps on this thing and open several tabs in Firefox. Windows 10 or 11 should have NEVER touched these devices with how under-powered with RAM they are.
Thing to consider, I work at a school, we bought these cheaper as we bought in bulk and put chrome flex on them - they work great and actually cost less than the cheapest chromebook.
I have one of these that has been collecting dust on my shelf for the past 7 years. Ran out of space after a few windows updates. This thing was terrible.
I got one from my uncle when he passed away. Yes, had to do a clean windows install from a usb install media to get the latest windows updates on it and it used most of the drive. I'm guessing you have the 32 GB version, 64 GB on the new ones I think would be just enough to at least be able to install updates. I tried linux for a while and it does use less of the drive, but once the drive is full you can't really install software on external media on linux as easily as you can with windows. Linux wants all the packages and everything to be on a single drive partition with the OS. So I went with Tiny10 and it only used like 10 GB of the drive and is debloated so it doesn't max the processor for stupidly long at boot, it's actually semi-usable now but still lags and the eMMC will die at some point.
The thing is that Microsoft could make a stripped back version of windows free of the bloat they include just for low end devices. But they know everyone would install that on higher end PCs too, because no-one wants that bloat. They kinda of already make a stripped back version with the LTSC build but they make it difficult for the average user to legally acquire it.
I got a machine with a similar CPU to this very cheap used and one of the first things I did was dig around the options to disable a lot of the windows spy features and it's unreal just how many they sneak into the OS. turned on by default. I mean, honestly, I have little over 1Ghz to play with. Do I really want to send information about every key press I make off to Microsoft?
They do make one, at least for 10, it's called enterprise IoT LTSC, it's what Tiny10 is based off of. Haven't heard one for 11, I think Tiny11 actually had to strip a bunch of stuff out manually.
Tiny 11. That's what I want cause I got a new low spec laptop with windows 11 s mode. I took it off s mode and after getting everything configured it works great but still it's a new laptop with 4g RAM and a Celeron processor. I don't know how to get tiny 11 or do I just delete everything unnecessary?
@@danieloshea3326 I had a dig in settings to turn all the Microspyware off, there's plenty of guides for that stuff. As for my RAM I doubled it for just £5 by typing in the model code and buying an exact match to the existing 4GB module for the empty slot. A second larger NVME SSD wouldn't hurt either if you have the slot for it.
I remember having one a decade ago in high school. It wasn okay for school reports, and making the occasional power point. I consider it like a first car, it will get you to there eventually without ac.
I've been using mine for years, and these types of computers have SO MANY issues that i don't recommend getting one, but you have to work with what you buy if its the only thing you can afford. Also, this thing is clearly not made for heavy games but it could probably run most games that was released in the 2000s or 2010s.
Is it worth it after the updates stop? We get the left over stock from the US and local vendors are advertising it to students. Since everyone has bank accounts these days and they need peace of mind online, I've been asked if they're safe and I don't feel like buying one just to answer the question.
As a former bestbuy employee i tried to avoid selling that laptop at all cost even though we were told to push it. I always almost begged customers to spend an extra $100 for a laptop that is 4x better. The only time that laptop to me was a good deal was when they would go on sale for $110. The only thing that made it worth the money was a 1 year membership. Within 3 months it will run slower than a turtle.
You should have bought a 2015-2017 Macbook Air. You can run Windows. You can upgrade the SSD. You can easily swap the battery because it's not glued in.
@@mattstone8878 Those are great devices indeed. Though I think the M1 MacBook Airs are better. And I highly don't recommend the 2018-2020 MacBook Air. Or the 2015-2017 MacBook. Or the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro. Or the 2011-2012 Macbook Pro.
At least you did better than an HP Stream POS, but next time I would just get a refurbished Lenovo Laptop off their outlet store that still has slots for upgradable RAM, and Storage, then you can stick whatever Linux distro you want on it if you don't like Windows as Lenovo certifies many of their models in the spec sheets to be fully Linux comptable.
@@mattstone8878 No thanks, I don't want to be stuck in the Apple ecosystem(yes there Ashi Linux for the Apple M series chips, but It can be a pain to get running, and it's not ready for prime time yet), I like freedom of choice in my OS, and to be able to upgrade my RAM, and Storage, or to be able to replace them if something does fail.
Yes, it's why so many people are pissed at MS for the windows 11 BS "requirements" that aren't actually needed, trying to sell more license keys by forcing people to buy new hardware using security/encryption as an excuse.
My brother in law had one of these.. the 64gb eflash storage or whatever was called was so bad it was slower than some hdds. I tried to install windows 10 and linux on it and there were no functional drivers for the crappy wlan card it had.
Honestly, it coming with a year of Office would be sick for college students, if it weren't for the fact that many colleges allow you to get office for free for as long as you are enrolled...
if all you use it for is checking email, word processing, and filling out applications, it gets the job done. If you need to do quite literally anything else. you should get something else. And they do go on sale for close to $100 around black friday. That's when most of them sold when I worked at target, and I did try and convince people to get ANYTHING else.
Those specs are essentially the same as the Gateway GWTC116 series and the Evolve III Maestro laptops that came out in 2019/2020. The laptop is basically a school/college laptop meant to handle very basic functions in a class environment.
advice: if youre looking for a affordable laptop for school or work i would highly recommend buying a used thinkpad. i bought a t430 slim for 40 bucks and its a fantastic machine. a lot of businesses use thinkpads and they get retired eventually when the company replaces laptops, so theres a lot of them for sale for a cheap price. ebay auctions are the best way to buy them.
A month ago, picked a Lenovo 500w Gen 3 (11" Intel) 2 in 1 Laptop for $180. It was 12" IPS touch display, Pentium N6000 processor, 128GB SSD and 8GB RAM.
Man I wanted a netbook SO bad when they came out. A full featured OS in something that small. Now it’s super laughable. Side note I just sold a laptop for $15 on Facebook marketplace. Bout it for $20 so I could run some update software on a laser cutting machine that’s software wouldn’t run on MacOS and I didn’t want to haul my desktop PC to the laser. I had forgotten how bad of a build quality so many budget laptops have. It was so plasticy and awful from trying to open it, to the keyboard and clicking the trackpad. I’ve been pampered by Apple products and higher end PC stuff for years. I didn’t realize that companies still made stuff that low quality.
I honestly forgot about HP streams. I bought one back in 2015 for college. It was relatively terrible, yes, but totally serviceable for the light workload I used it for in freshman classes at a community college.
This was my first ever laptop/pc and i remember playing minecraft at 20fps for about 3 or 4 years on it, now i'm running a system i built myself and seeing it again has brought me back to some dark times
Got my significant other through undergrad back in 2013-2016. Needed Google docs and notepad basically. Back then you could get it on sale at like 100-150 during black Friday. This replaced her dying 17" MacBook. She was happy with it as it was way lighter, battery life was ridiculous and she commuted to and from school. I'm going to have to dig it out and run Linux on it maybe
Honestly, I absolutely agree this time. Put in even the worst branded 120GB M.2 SSD, any real i3 even if it's 11th Gen and an FHD screen (bonus points for a light version of Linux like Lubuntu, I mean you are only gonna use a browser on that thing anyway) and the experience will be around 5x as good for 50% more cash.
i had this thing as my 1st laptop but it had windows 10, i got it for christmas, at first i thought it was good but issues started appearing everywhere, "Not enough storage" when taking a simple photo was CRAZY, and after being stored for like 2 months its boot time went from approx 30 seconds to OVER 4 MINUTES. Why HP thought it would be a good idea to put an outdated processor in a modern laptop is beyond me. Not even roblox could run at a smooth framerate, even my old ipad 8 at the time outperformed it.
I had a version of this a few years ago that came with a Ryzen 3 3300U (or something like that), and a 256gb SSD, I slapped an extra ram stick in there for 8gb and it was a surprisingly decent experience. It still couldn't really game much, but it was fine with multitasking to a point, I could have a half dozen browser tabs, a spotify window, and discord running and it was pretty alright.
There is a growing requirement in schools lately to do most of your school work on a computer or tablet. Most families can’t afford high end electronics for their kids so having a cheaper option for children’s school work is good. $100 more to some families is a choice whether you eat or not. But how would you know what that’s like?
hmm that resolution is HD. HD is only 720p, everyone thinks 1080p is HD but thats actually FHD. So yes that laptop does have a HD screen. Granted a bit of a cheap crappy one but its HD. Its meant for a cheap, breakable not losing much idea of a laptop. Like just kids, streaming, etc. If you dont pay the costs, lots of things only stream in HD (720p) not FHD or better. That's why it exists in 2024. But really never meant for anything past word processing at best, which is why it comes with 365. But for the cost, even 200 dollar chromebooks suck. To get good ones, youll be paying probably double that price and that's not a price that everyone can afford, especially for something given to a kid. And used market sucks for laptops, especially for cheap ones, they are usually beat to hell or used so hard things are just shit(damaged, broken, etc). I'd never give a kid a laptop that is 400-500+ for every day use, they destroy everything way too easily and not gonna toss hard earned cash at something for them to break. Rather run risk of losing say 200-250 bucks than say 350-450 for them breaking a fancier cheap laptop/used laptop just because it was "a bit faster." Cheap laptops have a use, even this one, just not a use for everyone. Even 100-150 bucks more is hard for many to afford. That's why lots are using 100-200 dollar or less smartphones that exist because they just can't afford better versions. Is it shit, yep, is it slow, yep, but it will load websites(granted slower), will word process, which is all a school kid needs or anyone who just doesn't do much on a pc.
Maybe they have sooooo many parts unique to that system that they just have to keep producing them until they can scrap the rest of them. I got a decent chromebook during Prime Days one year and it's perfect for the way my husband uses it, and he's actually that target market for this computer - really only needs an internet appliance. His iPad was fine for what he used it for, but got too old for updates and the battery wouldnt' hold a charge, but he did need something. Something told me to shy away from that HP Cheapo.
Out of my mind that i wouldve seen my daily laptop getting reviewed lmao. Please note the HP 14 Is just the general selling name but it was sold with VARIOUS different innards according to its serial number. Mine happens to have i7 128GB+1TB w/ 8GB, saw some even ship with Ryzen 5 or 7, HP just throw everything they had at these decaying shells (i said decaying as these has notorious long term hinge issues)
I purchased a steam in 2015 as my first laptop and it actually kickstarted a lot for me. Although I remember it came with 32gb or storage and came with windows 10. I’m forever grateful to it even though if it broke down two years later
I recently bought an HP Victus gaming laptop for $800 on sale with an i7 12th gen and 16GB ram, I used to have a $330 Lenovo Laptop and it was great until windows 11 hit it, my mom would not buy me an HP Stream because of the way it was and the specs of the HP stream gave me shivers…. It’s not good…
Honestly in my opinion to be serving the budget end of the market at this point computer manufacturers need to start doing what car companies do and promote their Certified Refurbished models more heavily. A midrange or flagship laptop from 3-4 years ago with a new battery would probably run circles around these ultra budget models and honestly it would probably save manufacturers and retailers money to not have to maintain as many SKUs or deal with excess returns.
I actually bought the original Stream 13 for school after watching your video (has it really been 10 years? Seesh!) and it worked fine for a few years, until a version of Windows 10 completely destroyed the performances (I think it was 1703 or 1709, but don't quote me on that). 2GB of RAM was pretty terrible, but it was workable. It's crazy that that laptop is still being sold today with barely more RAM and CPU, it's just a scam at this point.
I’m sure some parents pick this as baby’s first laptop, but I think old people are the real reason these devices are still on the market. As a former Best Buy employee, I can tell you they get a lot of elderly customers looking for the cheapest laptop available, usually declaring to the salesperson that they’re not a gamer. Anyway GamePass would probably work fine if you stick to cloud gaming.
I used to work at OD around the time these came about and they were what made me want to ro stop being a salesperson. I had no qualms about telling people it was a bad purchase, especially as long-term product, even on a tight budget. I would always push Chromebooks or even mid-level tablets for school work. The fact they're still making these in today's day and age speaks volumes about how HP and other "reputable" brands push crappy products above everything.
Just to share a fun fact, you can get a 15 inch or 13 inch MacBook Pro from 2013/2014 and use a patcher to get a newer version of MacOS for around $200. It won’t be comparable to the newer MacBooks of the recent years, but it would definitely be better than the HP laptop 14.
I bought, about 6 months ago, a Lenovo with a 5500U processor, 8gb of ram, which is upgradable to 16, an NVME drive and an upgradeable wifi chip. For the same price.
I bought a Lenovo Chromebook for about $160 a couple of years ago, and it is still my main laptop. It has a foldable display with an IPS touchscreen, 8GB or RAM, and i3 processor and I upgraded to the storage myself. There is literally no reason to buy something like this when you can get a Chromebook, I even do light gaming on Steam (Mainly Sims 4 and older games like Bioshock) and via emulation; it has been a very good machine and eye opening for how solid Chromebooks are nowadays.
I believe over at Microcenter they have a 14" Gateway Windows 11 laptop with a Ryzen 7 3700U, 16gb of memory and a 1TB SSD for like $300 which is an alright and could play some games well enough.
I had a £300 version of this with an AMD A6-9225 in 2019. Because of the extra £100 than the cheapest W10, it actually ran decent for the price for a year. It should be illegal to sell e-waste laptops, as they just go into landfill in like a year or two, and when you spend more, you get like 5-10 years out of the device
One of the schools I would tutor at. They would buy those for the students. They had online text books and it would make it earlier for the schools so the students wouldn’t have to carry a bunch of books Others would do the same but with android tablets and iPads
I have an HP Stream myself, I got it from the thrift store for a few dollars. Only 32GB Storage. Windows was pretty much unusable, but Linux Mint runs great on it. I use it for watching movies and TV Shows stored on my file server.
I had an OG HP Stream untill like a couple years ago and it fully met my needs! It could play downloaded videos (I mostly used it for watching videos in bed) and some retro games. Web browsing was a struggle, but it ran parsec just fine, so I usually just used parsec to stream a web browser running on my desktop pc (a little latency is fine when you're just browsing RUclips).
Important to point out that this price segment, outside of Chromebooks, almost never has USB-C/USB-PD charging. While Google mandated it years ago, Microsoft never has - so it's another corner they can and will cut. It saves them probably no more than a dime on the Bill of Materials, but if they sell 200,000 of these, that's $2 million! As an additional 'benefit' to HP, it means that a destroyed power cord will likely be a new machine purchase.
man I forgot about netbooks... I got one for Christmas in 2009 or 2010 it was my first pc I didn't have to share with my whole family and I definitely pushed the limits of what it could handle doing lol
I loved my HP Stream when I got it in 2014. Was perfect for just a tiny laptop I could throw in a bag. It ran linux with xfce perfectly and 2G was *just* enough to do even HD youtube back then and light multitasking. I'm still a big fan of the netbook 11-13 inch form factor, hopefully ARM will make them more viable in the future.
I think the hardware decoding was more why youtube might work more than linux. Linux /helps/ but it can't pull off miracles. I tried linux for a while, but once the drive is full linux doesn't really let you install software on external drives, you can store documents sure, but you can't install stuff from the repo onto an external drive as easily as you can windows. I ended up going to Tiny10, and while it wouldn't work for the 2 GB model as it uses 2 GB just running it does work on the 4 GB model and I could upgrade the ram for like $11 if I /really/ wanted to, but I have other computers to use besides a stream and only have it in the first place because it was my uncles and I don't like throwing away /technically/ working equipment. It's not really good for much though. I have it setup to run an autoclicker on a clicker game just to have it doing /something/ usable, and I will say it's /very/ light on power-consumption, like ~7 watts under load with the screen on low brightness, only like 5.5 watts with the screen closed.
My only usable computer is an old ASUS Laptop with literally 3 GB of ram while even my phone has 12 GB and I can't even browse the web with such a slow machine
I loved my Asus EEE PC netbook after upgrading memory and storage. A perfect vacation companion to store my photos on and book hotels. At that time. It always: cheap, small, powerful. But you can only pickup 2.
Friends that are not tech savvy would buy this. I needed a second smaller 11.6" laptop for travel, so in 2018 i got an HP ProBook x360 256GB storage, 8GB of ram, touch screen, HDMI port, even has an ethernet port, looks close to an HP Stream but has way better performance. lol wow i just found the HP stream under its new name.... simply HP Laptop, yes thats the name, how do I know its an HP stream in disguise? its specs Windows 11 Home in S mode, Celeron CPU, 4GB ram, 64 GB eMMC storage, 14" screen, and its the cheapest laptop on the HP website $200
I paid💰that amount on an 11” touchscreen Chromebook Flip (octacore Intel processor & 8gb ddr4 RAM) that turns into a Google tablet. Love ❤️ it. You have to actively look 👀 for that spec & pricing, but I’ve replicated it 3 times (twice for family members that saw mine & wanted).
There are some Linux phones out that can do this like the PinePhone, but the specs are not that great. Also I think because tablets exist, and can be had for so cheap, that a lot of phone makes don't see the need to put forth the effort to make something like a Samsung DEX mode.
These laptops always felt like a way to scam grandparents/parents and people who aren't tech savvy into buying these pieces of garbage thinking they got a good deal. I saw them when looking for laptops for my mom and was floored at how bad they are and how bad the price for them were. Ended up with a chromebook. The extra money for a better system is ALWAYS worth the wait especially when you figure in that the hundred or so dollars you're going to spend to get a better system will turn into another 200+ down the line when you NEED to upgrade , if you can wait. if you can't you're probably better off using a chisel and a rock as your daily driver (or buying used.) You know what's even sadder? For EIGHTY DOLLARS you can buy a raspberry pi 5 with 8gb of sdram and you'd probably have a better experience running that thing than this laptop. Granted your average tom dick and harry aren't going to know what to do with one of those but it is funny to see systems with 4gb of ram still being sold when 8 is barely enough.
There is a market for laptops like this: light productivity, office work, and light web. Maybe it can be used for light media consumption. If you already have a Windows device at home, I would say to get a cheap Android tablet, like the Lenovo M11 and a keyboard/trackpad case instead of this HP laptop. If you don't have a Windows device at home, and $200 is your budget with tax, then this laptop may be all you have to get and you'll just have to take the sacrifices. As long as you know this laptop's limitations, you'll be fine. The problem is that stores are selling it to do more than it can and that's the problem.
In 2014 this made sense kind-of for those looking for the absolutely cheap laptops to use only for Word or something. 10 years later, wherein the latest Chromebooks can run offline apps too thanks to Android or Linux, and with Chromebooks having sales for only $250 for laptops with at least 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with FHD displays, this makes zero sense. And yes, you can find Chromebooks with 4GB RAM and 64GB of Storage like the Lenovo Duet 3, but Chrome OS is far, far lighter than a fat Windows 11. Then there's the cheapest iPad that for a hundred dollars more, you're getting a hell lot more (again, to quote you, what's the use of a full fat OS if you can't run it all).
When I worked at Best Buy this was the most returned item in the store. It got so bad managers told us to turn customers away from the device to avoid then returns.
Thomas Crooks is back.
This thing is legit weaker than a $200 smartphone wtf
It’s probably weaker than an iPhone 5s from 2013 which is WILD
One surprising thing to me is the Celeron N4120 is better than the Atom processor. So, it's not the absolute cheapest and most worthless CPU they could put in the HP Stream. Still, I think a person would be better off using a base model iPad. And a person might even find mobile Microsoft office apps in Apple's App store.@@jimmy3951
@@jimmy3951 Not really.The single core performance at that price point plus the fact that it is an x86 and not an ARM makes a massive difference. One: upggradability, 2: choice of OS. Put Kubuntu or any Linux on it and it run a lot lot better.
@@domoncar6782 3 bigger screen which we knows wins over majority non tech savvy people lol.
@@domoncar6782 I'm a huge Linux guy, and yes a system like this will run better with a lighter Linux distro on it like Solus Budgie that's still using X11, and not Wayland for the compositor, but it won't be much better simply because of the EMMC storage which performs worse than most class 10 Micro SD cards, the weak Intel Celeron CPU, & 4GB of slow ram.
In fact sitting in my guest room as a backup laptop, I have a old 15.6in(1366X768 720p screen) ASUS laptop I got from e-waste with an Intel Core i3 2310M hyperthreaded dual core that I upgraded to 16GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM(24 bucks), new battery(18 bucks), and 256GB Netac SATA SSD(26 bucks) that performs better than these HP streams when running Manjaro Solus, the only thing I'm missing vs. something like an HP Stream here, is USB 3.0, and USB C, which is not a huge deal breaker in my book for something that cost me 68 bucks to fix up, that again performs better, and can handle multiple Chrome tabs even playing back RUclips, and other content at 720p.
My grandmother uses one of these. These type of laptops are pretty much for 70+ year olds who wants the cheapest laptop they can find and it is the only deciding factor instead of taking performance/specs into consideration, so they can go on FB and don’t care about how many Chrome tabs they can have open or how fast/slow the computer is
I wouldn't buy this for even my worst enemy, no one in the world deserve a Celeron in 2024
U could get a used laptop that is 5x better
@@arpro89 exactly. or even an used optiplex or something. i doubt ur granny cares about the fact that you can carry it around
@@-aku2805Some people like to take their PCs with them when they travel, but at that point I'd just say get them an iPad and be done with it
They are junk, my work bought five and they ended up in the bin before being a year old
I'm kinda in the mood to go out and buy an HP Stream...
Buy an HP 14 Laptop and upgrade the ram to 16gb.
I have one totally would recommend
I bought an basic Asus for £280 and slap SSD in making it quite capable machine for basic needs like text editing watching Netflix video calls and some old games (intel celeron n4020 1,1 GHz 8GB RAM DDR4 and intel UHD 600 integrated GPU)
same
I have an ASUS E410 which basically the same specs I got for $100 at MicroCenter, I tossed in a 1TB NVME SSD that cost just as much as the laptop and honestly Linux Mint was this devices savior. I can actually boot Skyrim at 60fps on this thing and open several tabs in Firefox. Windows 10 or 11 should have NEVER touched these devices with how under-powered with RAM they are.
You know it’s good when there’s celery inside... from 2019. Even if you refrigerated it, yikes.
hah
and the celery is discontinued lmao
6:23 Austin the laptop chiropractor
Thing to consider, I work at a school, we bought these cheaper as we bought in bulk and put chrome flex on them - they work great and actually cost less than the cheapest chromebook.
That doesn't mean they should be sold at Best Buy
@@mkkohls they should make it to school only, not to be sold by retailers.
@@Kenzie_Delvey they can't anymore. Chrome books made a monopoly with many American states
Yeah but think about performance. Time is important for kids
@@JeskidoYT they should at least bump the specs from a emmc 5.1 to an ssd and 128 min and the ram should be 8 gigs
Nothing against the rest of the crew, but this style of solo Austin content has been incredibly refreshing to see!
Austin Evans finally stopped using an entire can of hairspray🙏
lol
Austin without hair products looks like he's been going though some things 😂
@@Mr_Mcfeely yeah covid, its on his threads
The ozone layer likes this comment
@@C_C-who uses threads? 💀
I have one of these that has been collecting dust on my shelf for the past 7 years. Ran out of space after a few windows updates. This thing was terrible.
I got one from my uncle when he passed away. Yes, had to do a clean windows install from a usb install media to get the latest windows updates on it and it used most of the drive. I'm guessing you have the 32 GB version, 64 GB on the new ones I think would be just enough to at least be able to install updates. I tried linux for a while and it does use less of the drive, but once the drive is full you can't really install software on external media on linux as easily as you can with windows. Linux wants all the packages and everything to be on a single drive partition with the OS. So I went with Tiny10 and it only used like 10 GB of the drive and is debloated so it doesn't max the processor for stupidly long at boot, it's actually semi-usable now but still lags and the eMMC will die at some point.
I remember watching your video on that blue HP Stream back in the day and here we are today😅
The thing is that Microsoft could make a stripped back version of windows free of the bloat they include just for low end devices. But they know everyone would install that on higher end PCs too, because no-one wants that bloat. They kinda of already make a stripped back version with the LTSC build but they make it difficult for the average user to legally acquire it.
I got a machine with a similar CPU to this very cheap used and one of the first things I did was dig around the options to disable a lot of the windows spy features and it's unreal just how many they sneak into the OS. turned on by default. I mean, honestly, I have little over 1Ghz to play with. Do I really want to send information about every key press I make off to Microsoft?
They do make one, at least for 10, it's called enterprise IoT LTSC, it's what Tiny10 is based off of. Haven't heard one for 11, I think Tiny11 actually had to strip a bunch of stuff out manually.
Tiny 11. That's what I want cause I got a new low spec laptop with windows 11 s mode. I took it off s mode and after getting everything configured it works great but still it's a new laptop with 4g RAM and a Celeron processor. I don't know how to get tiny 11 or do I just delete everything unnecessary?
@@Wehiremonkeyscan you tell me how to optimize my low spec new laptop?
@@danieloshea3326 I had a dig in settings to turn all the Microspyware off, there's plenty of guides for that stuff.
As for my RAM I doubled it for just £5 by typing in the model code and buying an exact match to the existing 4GB module for the empty slot.
A second larger NVME SSD wouldn't hurt either if you have the slot for it.
I really enjoy this kind of video style. It's changes up things compared to your regular "table content" :)
I remember having one a decade ago in high school. It wasn okay for school reports, and making the occasional power point. I consider it like a first car, it will get you to there eventually without ac.
HD = 720p full HD / FHD = 1080p
I've been using mine for years, and these types of computers have SO MANY issues that i don't recommend getting one, but you have to work with what you buy if its the only thing you can afford.
Also, this thing is clearly not made for heavy games but it could probably run most games that was released in the 2000s or 2010s.
180 new is indeed very little but you can get a thinkpad for that price. And not even an insanely old one, you can get a t470s for that
Exactly. And thinkpad laptops are insanelly upgradeable.
Solo Austin is back!!
I have a windows chromebook from 2016💀
Same 😂
I have 3 and they are great
Is it worth it after the updates stop? We get the left over stock from the US and local vendors are advertising it to students. Since everyone has bank accounts these days and they need peace of mind online, I've been asked if they're safe and I don't feel like buying one just to answer the question.
@@hamzasultan96 Yes it’s worth it. My windows chromebook can run a windows 11 vm
E-waste straight from the new box.
Yep a 2006 or 2008 MacBook Pro is way better
As a former bestbuy employee i tried to avoid selling that laptop at all cost even though we were told to push it. I always almost begged customers to spend an extra $100 for a laptop that is 4x better. The only time that laptop to me was a good deal was when they would go on sale for $110. The only thing that made it worth the money was a 1 year membership. Within 3 months it will run slower than a turtle.
That wallpaper brought back a lot of memories 😅
Didn't know you could buy a laptop at a 24 hour fitness :O
I want a video on that
In Geoff Peterson's voice:
"Windows 11 aśśmöde"
When your phone outperforms this thing:
12:37 My 1GB HP netbook with an atom processor running Windows 10 is actually faster than that thing 💀
It really isn't
@@yes-mq5xdIt is since windows 10 sucks.
I almost bought this thing because I was in the market for a light work device. I went with an android tablet with a keyboard attachment instead.
You should have bought a 2015-2017 Macbook Air. You can run Windows. You can upgrade the SSD. You can easily swap the battery because it's not glued in.
@@mattstone8878 Those are great devices indeed. Though I think the M1 MacBook Airs are better. And I highly don't recommend the 2018-2020 MacBook Air. Or the 2015-2017 MacBook. Or the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro. Or the 2011-2012 Macbook Pro.
At least you did better than an HP Stream POS, but next time I would just get a refurbished Lenovo Laptop off their outlet store that still has slots for upgradable RAM, and Storage, then you can stick whatever Linux distro you want on it if you don't like Windows as Lenovo certifies many of their models in the spec sheets to be fully Linux comptable.
@@CommodoreFan64 Or buy a something with an M1 if you can stretch
@@mattstone8878 No thanks, I don't want to be stuck in the Apple ecosystem(yes there Ashi Linux for the Apple M series chips, but It can be a pain to get running, and it's not ready for prime time yet), I like freedom of choice in my OS, and to be able to upgrade my RAM, and Storage, or to be able to replace them if something does fail.
This thing supports windows 11 but my $1k custom built pc from 5 years ago doesn’t? Huh?
Yes, it's why so many people are pissed at MS for the windows 11 BS "requirements" that aren't actually needed, trying to sell more license keys by forcing people to buy new hardware using security/encryption as an excuse.
My brother in law had one of these.. the 64gb eflash storage or whatever was called was so bad it was slower than some hdds. I tried to install windows 10 and linux on it and there were no functional drivers for the crappy wlan card it had.
Honestly, it coming with a year of Office would be sick for college students, if it weren't for the fact that many colleges allow you to get office for free for as long as you are enrolled...
Still feeling under the weather? Hope you gwt well soon man. Thnx for the upload
if all you use it for is checking email, word processing, and filling out applications, it gets the job done. If you need to do quite literally anything else. you should get something else. And they do go on sale for close to $100 around black friday. That's when most of them sold when I worked at target, and I did try and convince people to get ANYTHING else.
People keep buying it and thus manufacturers will keep making it.
Those specs are essentially the same as the Gateway GWTC116 series and the Evolve III Maestro laptops that came out in 2019/2020. The laptop is basically a school/college laptop meant to handle very basic functions in a class environment.
6:23 the laptop wasn't even clipped in properly 💀💀💀💀💀
advice: if youre looking for a affordable laptop for school or work i would highly recommend buying a used thinkpad. i bought a t430 slim for 40 bucks and its a fantastic machine. a lot of businesses use thinkpads and they get retired eventually when the company replaces laptops, so theres a lot of them for sale for a cheap price. ebay auctions are the best way to buy them.
A month ago, picked a Lenovo 500w Gen 3 (11" Intel) 2 in 1 Laptop for $180. It was 12" IPS touch display, Pentium N6000 processor, 128GB SSD and 8GB RAM.
Man I wanted a netbook SO bad when they came out. A full featured OS in something that small. Now it’s super laughable.
Side note I just sold a laptop for $15 on Facebook marketplace. Bout it for $20 so I could run some update software on a laser cutting machine that’s software wouldn’t run on MacOS and I didn’t want to haul my desktop PC to the laser. I had forgotten how bad of a build quality so many budget laptops have. It was so plasticy and awful from trying to open it, to the keyboard and clicking the trackpad. I’ve been pampered by Apple products and higher end PC stuff for years. I didn’t realize that companies still made stuff that low quality.
Slap Debian with XFCE onto it and it'll run like a dream.
I honestly forgot about HP streams. I bought one back in 2015 for college. It was relatively terrible, yes, but totally serviceable for the light workload I used it for in freshman classes at a community college.
This was my first ever laptop/pc and i remember playing minecraft at 20fps for about 3 or 4 years on it, now i'm running a system i built myself and seeing it again has brought me back to some dark times
Got my significant other through undergrad back in 2013-2016. Needed Google docs and notepad basically. Back then you could get it on sale at like 100-150 during black Friday. This replaced her dying 17" MacBook. She was happy with it as it was way lighter, battery life was ridiculous and she commuted to and from school. I'm going to have to dig it out and run Linux on it maybe
Honestly, I absolutely agree this time. Put in even the worst branded 120GB M.2 SSD, any real i3 even if it's 11th Gen and an FHD screen (bonus points for a light version of Linux like Lubuntu, I mean you are only gonna use a browser on that thing anyway) and the experience will be around 5x as good for 50% more cash.
i had this thing as my 1st laptop but it had windows 10, i got it for christmas, at first i thought it was good but issues started appearing everywhere, "Not enough storage" when taking a simple photo was CRAZY, and after being stored for like 2 months its boot time went from approx 30 seconds to OVER 4 MINUTES. Why HP thought it would be a good idea to put an outdated processor in a modern laptop is beyond me. Not even roblox could run at a smooth framerate, even my old ipad 8 at the time outperformed it.
I had a version of this a few years ago that came with a Ryzen 3 3300U (or something like that), and a 256gb SSD, I slapped an extra ram stick in there for 8gb and it was a surprisingly decent experience. It still couldn't really game much, but it was fine with multitasking to a point, I could have a half dozen browser tabs, a spotify window, and discord running and it was pretty alright.
There is a growing requirement in schools lately to do most of your school work on a computer or tablet. Most families can’t afford high end electronics for their kids so having a cheaper option for children’s school work is good. $100 more to some families is a choice whether you eat or not. But how would you know what that’s like?
hmm that resolution is HD. HD is only 720p, everyone thinks 1080p is HD but thats actually FHD. So yes that laptop does have a HD screen. Granted a bit of a cheap crappy one but its HD.
Its meant for a cheap, breakable not losing much idea of a laptop. Like just kids, streaming, etc. If you dont pay the costs, lots of things only stream in HD (720p) not FHD or better. That's why it exists in 2024. But really never meant for anything past word processing at best, which is why it comes with 365.
But for the cost, even 200 dollar chromebooks suck. To get good ones, youll be paying probably double that price and that's not a price that everyone can afford, especially for something given to a kid. And used market sucks for laptops, especially for cheap ones, they are usually beat to hell or used so hard things are just shit(damaged, broken, etc). I'd never give a kid a laptop that is 400-500+ for every day use, they destroy everything way too easily and not gonna toss hard earned cash at something for them to break. Rather run risk of losing say 200-250 bucks than say 350-450 for them breaking a fancier cheap laptop/used laptop just because it was "a bit faster."
Cheap laptops have a use, even this one, just not a use for everyone. Even 100-150 bucks more is hard for many to afford. That's why lots are using 100-200 dollar or less smartphones that exist because they just can't afford better versions. Is it shit, yep, is it slow, yep, but it will load websites(granted slower), will word process, which is all a school kid needs or anyone who just doesn't do much on a pc.
at this Budget buy used. you can find good options (atleast better than the hp stream) for that price.
Buy used then. Why would you lower your standard to "budget" options when you can have better experiences with yesterday's fine offers?
some $300 chromebooks have good specs for that price
10:10 I disagree. In my experience an average consumer who finds the laptop horrible will buy a different brand next time
Maybe they have sooooo many parts unique to that system that they just have to keep producing them until they can scrap the rest of them. I got a decent chromebook during Prime Days one year and it's perfect for the way my husband uses it, and he's actually that target market for this computer - really only needs an internet appliance. His iPad was fine for what he used it for, but got too old for updates and the battery wouldnt' hold a charge, but he did need something. Something told me to shy away from that HP Cheapo.
my work still uses pagers which became popular in the 1980's. So yeah that beats the stream
Out of my mind that i wouldve seen my daily laptop getting reviewed lmao. Please note the HP 14 Is just the general selling name but it was sold with VARIOUS different innards according to its serial number. Mine happens to have i7 128GB+1TB w/ 8GB, saw some even ship with Ryzen 5 or 7, HP just throw everything they had at these decaying shells (i said decaying as these has notorious long term hinge issues)
I purchased a steam in 2015 as my first laptop and it actually kickstarted a lot for me. Although I remember it came with 32gb or storage and came with windows 10. I’m forever grateful to it even though if it broke down two years later
I recently bought an HP Victus gaming laptop for $800 on sale with an i7 12th gen and 16GB ram, I used to have a $330 Lenovo Laptop and it was great until windows 11 hit it, my mom would not buy me an HP Stream because of the way it was and the specs of the HP stream gave me shivers…. It’s not good…
Honestly in my opinion to be serving the budget end of the market at this point computer manufacturers need to start doing what car companies do and promote their Certified Refurbished models more heavily. A midrange or flagship laptop from 3-4 years ago with a new battery would probably run circles around these ultra budget models and honestly it would probably save manufacturers and retailers money to not have to maintain as many SKUs or deal with excess returns.
I actually bought the original Stream 13 for school after watching your video (has it really been 10 years? Seesh!) and it worked fine for a few years, until a version of Windows 10 completely destroyed the performances (I think it was 1703 or 1709, but don't quote me on that). 2GB of RAM was pretty terrible, but it was workable. It's crazy that that laptop is still being sold today with barely more RAM and CPU, it's just a scam at this point.
What makes Chromebooks better in my opinion is that ChromeOS is designed to run on a low end machine, and as a result, it runs smoother
I’m sure some parents pick this as baby’s first laptop, but I think old people are the real reason these devices are still on the market. As a former Best Buy employee, I can tell you they get a lot of elderly customers looking for the cheapest laptop available, usually declaring to the salesperson that they’re not a gamer. Anyway GamePass would probably work fine if you stick to cloud gaming.
I used to work at OD around the time these came about and they were what made me want to ro stop being a salesperson. I had no qualms about telling people it was a bad purchase, especially as long-term product, even on a tight budget. I would always push Chromebooks or even mid-level tablets for school work. The fact they're still making these in today's day and age speaks volumes about how HP and other "reputable" brands push crappy products above everything.
That's so strange I've never seen this laptop here in germany.
But it looks like we're not missing much.
Just to share a fun fact, you can get a 15 inch or 13 inch MacBook Pro from 2013/2014 and use a patcher to get a newer version of MacOS for around $200. It won’t be comparable to the newer MacBooks of the recent years, but it would definitely be better than the HP laptop 14.
I bought, about 6 months ago, a Lenovo with a 5500U processor, 8gb of ram, which is upgradable to 16, an NVME drive and an upgradeable wifi chip. For the same price.
I bought a Lenovo Chromebook for about $160 a couple of years ago, and it is still my main laptop. It has a foldable display with an IPS touchscreen, 8GB or RAM, and i3 processor and I upgraded to the storage myself. There is literally no reason to buy something like this when you can get a Chromebook, I even do light gaming on Steam (Mainly Sims 4 and older games like Bioshock) and via emulation; it has been a very good machine and eye opening for how solid Chromebooks are nowadays.
I believe over at Microcenter they have a 14" Gateway Windows 11 laptop with a Ryzen 7 3700U, 16gb of memory and a 1TB SSD for like $300 which is an alright and could play some games well enough.
I had a £300 version of this with an AMD A6-9225 in 2019. Because of the extra £100 than the cheapest W10, it actually ran decent for the price for a year. It should be illegal to sell e-waste laptops, as they just go into landfill in like a year or two, and when you spend more, you get like 5-10 years out of the device
Erm... ChromeOS Flex comes in clutch here!
One of the schools I would tutor at. They would buy those for the students. They had online text books and it would make it earlier for the schools so the students wouldn’t have to carry a bunch of books
Others would do the same but with android tablets and iPads
Hell, even Surface book 2's are $150-$180 on ebay and are so much better
I have an HP Stream myself, I got it from the thrift store for a few dollars. Only 32GB Storage. Windows was pretty much unusable, but Linux Mint runs great on it. I use it for watching movies and TV Shows stored on my file server.
I had an OG HP Stream untill like a couple years ago and it fully met my needs! It could play downloaded videos (I mostly used it for watching videos in bed) and some retro games. Web browsing was a struggle, but it ran parsec just fine, so I usually just used parsec to stream a web browser running on my desktop pc (a little latency is fine when you're just browsing RUclips).
Important to point out that this price segment, outside of Chromebooks, almost never has USB-C/USB-PD charging. While Google mandated it years ago, Microsoft never has - so it's another corner they can and will cut. It saves them probably no more than a dime on the Bill of Materials, but if they sell 200,000 of these, that's $2 million! As an additional 'benefit' to HP, it means that a destroyed power cord will likely be a new machine purchase.
I have the same one but higher end! I never knew how low end they could possibly get!
Ps mine has an 11th gen Intel core i5 and 8gb ram and 256gb ssd
man I forgot about netbooks... I got one for Christmas in 2009 or 2010 it was my first pc I didn't have to share with my whole family and I definitely pushed the limits of what it could handle doing lol
I bought a similar hp 14 laptop as yours and after 2 years the keyboard chassis breaks in the corner due to the hinge being lifted when needed
I loved my HP Stream when I got it in 2014. Was perfect for just a tiny laptop I could throw in a bag. It ran linux with xfce perfectly and 2G was *just* enough to do even HD youtube back then and light multitasking.
I'm still a big fan of the netbook 11-13 inch form factor, hopefully ARM will make them more viable in the future.
I think the hardware decoding was more why youtube might work more than linux. Linux /helps/ but it can't pull off miracles. I tried linux for a while, but once the drive is full linux doesn't really let you install software on external drives, you can store documents sure, but you can't install stuff from the repo onto an external drive as easily as you can windows. I ended up going to Tiny10, and while it wouldn't work for the 2 GB model as it uses 2 GB just running it does work on the 4 GB model and I could upgrade the ram for like $11 if I /really/ wanted to, but I have other computers to use besides a stream and only have it in the first place because it was my uncles and I don't like throwing away /technically/ working equipment. It's not really good for much though. I have it setup to run an autoclicker on a clicker game just to have it doing /something/ usable, and I will say it's /very/ light on power-consumption, like ~7 watts under load with the screen on low brightness, only like 5.5 watts with the screen closed.
My only usable computer is an old ASUS Laptop with literally 3 GB of ram while even my phone has 12 GB and I can't even browse the web with such a slow machine
I loved my Asus EEE PC netbook after upgrading memory and storage. A perfect vacation companion to store my photos on and book hotels. At that time.
It always: cheap, small, powerful. But you can only pickup 2.
In fact, you get the computer for free, you only pay for Office 365 and the operating system and one month of the Game Pass is a good deal
Friends that are not tech savvy would buy this. I needed a second smaller 11.6" laptop for travel, so in 2018 i got an HP ProBook x360 256GB storage, 8GB of ram, touch screen, HDMI port, even has an ethernet port, looks close to an HP Stream but has way better performance.
lol wow i just found the HP stream under its new name.... simply HP Laptop, yes thats the name, how do I know its an HP stream in disguise? its specs Windows 11 Home in S mode, Celeron CPU, 4GB ram, 64 GB eMMC storage, 14" screen, and its the cheapest laptop on the HP website $200
I paid💰that amount on an 11” touchscreen Chromebook Flip (octacore Intel processor & 8gb ddr4 RAM) that turns into a Google tablet. Love ❤️ it. You have to actively look 👀 for that spec & pricing, but I’ve replicated it 3 times (twice for family members that saw mine & wanted).
My dad got me one sometime around 2021/2022. It was equipped with AMD Ryzen and Radeon for some reason. It started crapping out this year.
It actually became usable if you can upgrade the ram to atleast 8 gb
Is it possible for you to get rid of Windows 11 and try installing Linux to see if at least is usable that way?
Hey Austin, the order number was still visible in the top left of the Amazon invoice you showed at the start of the video.
I bought the Ryzen version of this (3250U), upgraded to 16gb of RAM and I'm quite satisfied with it
The phone comparison; WHY DON'T WE HAVE A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT ON ALL PHONES YET!?
It makes SO much sense.
There are some Linux phones out that can do this like the PinePhone, but the specs are not that great. Also I think because tablets exist, and can be had for so cheap, that a lot of phone makes don't see the need to put forth the effort to make something like a Samsung DEX mode.
I loved my netbook, but it worked A HELL OF A LOT BETTER with linux, to be fair.
While it might suck to run windows, it'd probably run Debian or Arch just fine.
I recognized that 24 hour fitness 👀
La Habra lmao
Basically, this is for people who only use the web. They may be college students who don't game and simply use it for Office and to stream.
These laptops always felt like a way to scam grandparents/parents and people who aren't tech savvy into buying these pieces of garbage thinking they got a good deal. I saw them when looking for laptops for my mom and was floored at how bad they are and how bad the price for them were. Ended up with a chromebook.
The extra money for a better system is ALWAYS worth the wait especially when you figure in that the hundred or so dollars you're going to spend to get a better system will turn into another 200+ down the line when you NEED to upgrade , if you can wait. if you can't you're probably better off using a chisel and a rock as your daily driver (or buying used.)
You know what's even sadder? For EIGHTY DOLLARS you can buy a raspberry pi 5 with 8gb of sdram and you'd probably have a better experience running that thing than this laptop. Granted your average tom dick and harry aren't going to know what to do with one of those but it is funny to see systems with 4gb of ram still being sold when 8 is barely enough.
10:30 so true you can buy cheap stuff but hate it the next day it's not worth it
I run an electronics department at a walmart.. these sell well for school and i had to order up an additional 20 for back to school/college sell
Laptops with screen resolution of 1366x768 are still extremely common here in South Africa. And some of these laptops are not exactly cheap in price.
HP really givin the Stream the iPod Touch treatment 🗿
(tiny ass updates every couple of years, tho yeah it died)
I bought a laptop with a 1650 for $200 used that smokes the HP stream.
Specs: i7
16gb ram
Gtx 1650
Ssd 256gb
Day 1 and a half of asking you to make a video of the Back Market trade in process 😂 WOULD BE A GREAT VIDEO🙏
There is a market for laptops like this: light productivity, office work, and light web. Maybe it can be used for light media consumption. If you already have a Windows device at home, I would say to get a cheap Android tablet, like the Lenovo M11 and a keyboard/trackpad case instead of this HP laptop. If you don't have a Windows device at home, and $200 is your budget with tax, then this laptop may be all you have to get and you'll just have to take the sacrifices. As long as you know this laptop's limitations, you'll be fine. The problem is that stores are selling it to do more than it can and that's the problem.
My 2016 Lenovo thinkpad has the same resolution but blows this thing away with 7th gen I5 and 8 gigs of ram, plus I added a fast enough ssd to it!
Both my parents have one… when you go above two tabs in edge it complains that cpu usage is too high XD
In 2014 this made sense kind-of for those looking for the absolutely cheap laptops to use only for Word or something. 10 years later, wherein the latest Chromebooks can run offline apps too thanks to Android or Linux, and with Chromebooks having sales for only $250 for laptops with at least 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with FHD displays, this makes zero sense.
And yes, you can find Chromebooks with 4GB RAM and 64GB of Storage like the Lenovo Duet 3, but Chrome OS is far, far lighter than a fat Windows 11. Then there's the cheapest iPad that for a hundred dollars more, you're getting a hell lot more (again, to quote you, what's the use of a full fat OS if you can't run it all).
Austin: "...Limit yourself to a couple of tabs..."
Me: _glances at the 300+ tabs open_ Uh, yeah, that's not going to work for me...