I spent many hours using HP’s 14, a $289 Windows laptop. You’re all welcome.
The year is 2023, and my tireless quest to find a Windows laptop under $500 that isn’t a flaming pile of trash continues. While I’ve long maintained that people constrained to that category should just get Chromebooks, I understand that this recommendation makes quite a few people very, very angry.
So I’m coming to you today from the HP 14, a 14-inch silver laptop that we purchased from Amazon for $289. It has an 11th Gen Core i3 processor (yes, it’s an older chip, but that’s why it’s so cheap — such is life), 4GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. This is just about as cheap as a Windows laptop can get. (HP’s listed MSRP for this model is $469.99, but you can get it for far less without much effort.) And to see if it’s a viable budget purchase, I spent a full workday on the device, morning to night.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t terrible? I mean, it wasn’t great. But I was surprised by how well it went.
First thing in the morning, I turned on the HP 14 and attempted to load the various programs I use in review testing: Chrome, Slack, Spotify, Steam, display calibration stuff, and the like. (No matter how much Microsoft bullies me about it, I will not switch to Edge, you monsters.) I was blocked from doing all of this because the HP 14 had, it turned out, come out of the box in S mode. Well, that wasn’t going to fly. I turned that off right quick. The world didn’t end; the laptop continued running just fine.
With that out of the way, I began my workday with around 10 Chrome tabs and Slack open. A couple of things froze the first time I tried to do this, so I ended up restarting the computer. This seemed to fix whatever problem it was having. Some things never change.
From that point on, I was impressed by how well the Core i3 handled my workload. There was no point when I really felt constrained or like I needed to avoid opening additional tabs to prevent slowdown. It wasn’t fast, to be clear, but I could get everything done that I needed to with minimal thumb-twiddling.
I conducted multiple video calls over Google Meet using the “HP TrueVision HD” camera overtop my Chrome tabs, and they actually ran without any stutter or slowdown (which is much more than I can say for many other cheap laptops). Co-workers told me that my video feed was grainy and they couldn’t make out too many details, but there wasn’t any lag or disruptive processing on my end.
The fans spun up the first time I opened Chrome but were actually surprisingly quiet after that. They were certainly chugging at points, but they were being much more polite about it than the fans of many premium laptops (*cough* Dell XPS).
I worked on some photos in the afternoon (the ones I shot for this review). And would you look at that — there’s an SD slot! I couldn’t be happier about this considering the number of very expensive laptops I’ve reviewed in recent months that have, like, no ports at all. And the device lasted around six and a half hours to a charge, which, honestly, should cause some much more expensive 14-inch laptops to take a good hard look at themselves.
You know what? It actually kind of ran. We cranked the game down to its absolute lowest settings, and we got a solid 30 frames per second. Now, it’s a very good thing we didn’t settle on Overwatch because you wouldn’t want to use this device for a title with any kind of action. But for a leisurely, low-stakes turn-based game of building granaries, researching mining, trading whales, and occasionally wiping out cities, it worked just fine.
- Microsoft Software License terms (Windows Operating System) and Manufacturer’s Limited Hardware Warranty and Agreement
In addition, there are a bunch of optional things to agree to:
- Privacy settings including location, Find My Device, diagnostic data, inking and typing, tailored experiences, advertising ID
That’s two mandatory agreements and six optional ones.
Now, do I necessarily recommend that you buy this? If you can afford something with more storage, a brighter screen, a bigger touchpad, and a better-looking and better-built chassis, then no. But if you need Windows, and you need Windows for cheaper than $300, then voilà. Here’s a device that functions just fine, comes with some semblance of integrated graphics inside, and even has a port selection that’s nothing to sneeze at. Here, I found it. I’m going to go use something else now.
Photography by Monica Chin / The Verge