I think this is actually a pretty decent laptop for the price. A friend needed something affordable for uni and enlisted my help to try and find a decent laptop at a cheap price. Now I share this with you all:
- 15.6" FHD 1080p screen. A lot of the cheap laptops have 1366 x 768 resolution screens, so the 1080p is nice and suits the larger display size for work/study/watching videos.
- AMD Ryzen™ 5 5500U processor (6 cores / 12 threads). Much better than the Pentium/Athalon processors found in many cheap laptops.
- The CPU has an integrated GPU (Radeon Vega 7 Graphics) which can run many games decent enough. Though more demanding titles will need their resolution and/or settings turned down.
- 8GB DDR4-3200 MHz RAM. It's enough for most things, though it appears to be configured with just 1 stick, so opening the laptop up and adding another stick to enable dual channel operation would give a small performance uplift in some tasks (or allow some RAM-hungry games to run).
- 256GB SSD. Most laptops come with an SSD these days and it is essential for a snappy/responsive experience. The capacity is okay - running out of space could be overcome with cloud storage or external drives. Doesn't really seem like much of an issue these days considering we mostly stream content, though having multiple games installed at once would quickly eat into this. There is scope to open the laptop up and replace the SSD to something larger if required.
- 3-cell, 41 Wh Li-ion battery. This is a bit better than other cheap laptops which often have ~37Wh batteries. This could mean up to nearly an extra hour of battery life for light tasks. HP advertise 9.5 hours of battery life but realistically this would be more like ~7 hours (and obviously a lot less if gaming).
- 1.69kg and 1.79cm thick. So reasonably thin and light, and should be convenient enough to carry around.
- Click the "+Expand to see more" option to view all the specs such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI, USB-C, etc.
In summary, I think it is a decent all-rounder and good value at the $679 price tag. You could potentially reduce the price a bit further via discounted gift cards.
If you're wanting something for heavier gaming with higher settings, or colour-accurate work, then you'll probably be better off with a different, more expensive laptop.
Hopefully this helps!
Plus for effort in the description