had my neighbor get 2 of these, one for one of his kids, one for his wife.
I set them up for him… here’s my summary:
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it takes an m.2… go buy a 256gb m.2 (not the one on woot, it’s not a great deal) and use it for a boot drive. BE CAREFUL, if you aren’t computer savvy, you will have a heck of a time doing this, however it’s completely doable. Resinstalling windows from scratch is by far the best option, but you will need at least 2 drivers from HP’s website (disk and wifi) or you’ll be dead in the water. The windows key is stored in the bios somewhere, so you don’t have to write it down, it just loaded up with the fresh windows install.
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if you don’t do that, you have 2 problems: first: the 5400rpm drive is super slow and not well matched for the 11th gen i5 it’s packing. slow load times. snappy response post load. second: HP has TON’S of bloatware… super annoying. fresh windows install removes all that. if you first make some kind of recovery disk from the native install… you’ll get all that junk.
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if you do try to replace / add m.2… removing the back cover was the hardest time i’ve ever had doing that on any laptop (maybe done 20-30 in my life). google it, there’s a video that will help you, i reccommend plastic pry tools (think cell phone repair).
in summary: the laptops are really nice… m.2 boot (or completely replace the HDD with a 2.5 in SSD, also works). you’ll need some computer skills to reinstall windows (and even if you just do a clone to the ‘new’ drive, you’ll need some skill). find a friend like me (i’m a moron when it comes to building things… my neighbor is awesome at it, we trade services all the time).
hope this helps.
Thank you. I feel like getting one each for SO and mother-in-law because their computers are new but so, so slow.
windows boot time and generally anything loading off the HD will feel ‘slow’. everything else (browsing web, using apps once loaded into RAM) should feel snappy.