A 17" display and only 1600x900 resolution? Disgusting. Consumers shouldn’t buy laptops with such ridiculously inappropriate displays until the manufacturers (HP in particular seeming to be the worst offender) get the message.
While I fully agree (almost) with your opinion, the scale on 4K screens aren’t very productive. If you’re going to have to zoom the screen to 130% just so desktop icons and fonts are larger than a gnat, then the 1600x900 kinda makes sense for productivity. If you’re into web surfing only, buy a tablet with the higher resolution.
Is there a build date on these?
That is pretty standard for 17" touchscreens. Much higher resolution and it would be difficult to use the touchscreen without having to resort to a stylus to be able to pick out what you’re tapping.
Build date would have to be in the last several months. Win11 wasn’t being pre-installed on computers until late October 2021. The processor is an 11th gen Intel, while the 12th gen was release in October of 2021 it wasn’t a typical build option until just a few months ago.
From what I’ve seen with 17" touchscreen laptops is they’ve opted for 1600x900 resolution for a mix of ease of touchscreen usage and also a higher resolution screen would likely push the price up higher than a 15" with a 1080p IPS screen. I will say touchscreen is hard with 1080p screens at times, on my 13" I’ve had to use a stylus for better accuracy.
I think one upside with this laptop is having a dedicated GPU even though its a low tier Nvidia MX350 its better than the shared Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics which can take up to 2-4GB of memory depending upon how much system memory you have. I also sense some may also choose this 17" as it has a DVDRW drive which may matter for some still using iTunes to rip music to their phone/mp3 player.
I spent the better part of 10 years living with a series of dual core i3 (with and without hyperthreading) 17 inch 1600x900 hp laptos. Not one failed due to anything other than user error/damage. One got lost at the airport in my luggage, one got stepped on by an intern, etc. The screen is good enough, you don’t really notice the lack of 1080p. I used them as almost disposable travel laptops for work, where I needed something better than trash but not a desktop replacement, and my four eyes wanted more than 15 inches. For specific use cases, these are great. I have an aunt in her 70s who wants to browse the web and play DVDs but has already dropped 2 laptops in 2 years. I’ve also passed these on to kids who need better than a school craptop but aren’t old enough to be responsible with something better. 1600x900 is HP’s “thing” that they’ve done for what, two decades now? It’s not 1080p, but I’ll take it 24/7/365 over a 15 inch 1366x768 garbo laptop.
The real question we should be asking and answering is this laptop worth $500 given what is included. Sure, it would be great to have a faster processor, higher resolution, and a better graphics card but show me the laptop that has that for $500, please!
DO NOT buy this for the graphics card! The integrated GPU on the 1135G7 is on par with the MX350 GPU, making the MX350 worthless to most buyers. You can get better 1135G7 laptops for $500, or grab a $500 laptop with an AMD CPU with vastly superior integrated graphics. Just don’t buy this specifically for any gaming potential from the GPU.
This is really a mixed bag… it has a newer CPU and W11 but everything else on it has been used for years. Notice there are no modern high-speed ports. An mx350 is really a 1050 (Pascal/640 shaders/DDR5).
Seeing that it’s a refurb makes a bit more sense but I have most of this hardware in a 17" HP running a 4th gen i7. It’s the same chassis, screen, drive config, and awkward memory (why do 4+8 gigs to people in this age?).
As for the 17" + weird resolution, it’s actually great for most use cases. You dont need as many pixels with that size, truly. I use a 28" 4k in my office and a 27" 1080@240hz for gaming at home. It’s a 17" laptop screen… it’s not ideal for any sort of gaming as mentioned by others. But it is great to have that real estate on the go. I worked with 13 and 15 inch laptops professionally for 13 years and I’ll take a 17 at a weird res all day.
I would really like to know why there are so many late-model refurbished HP laptops for sale on Woot almost every day. Today there are two different models. I bought one in February. It has the Ryzen 5 CPU and I’m very pleased with it. Is there one component that goes bad very early that causes all these laptops to be refurbished?
I can tell you how I got mine for dirt cheap and it was the factory SSD going out. I refurb on the side and, sadly, you have a lot of people who sell/warranty because of slowness but have no idea how to reimage the device.
9/10 times a fresh OS install resolves most issues. SSDs hit end of life in far less time than traditional mechanical drives as well. A new one of those paired with a fresh OS and it’s like new again.
These aluminum HP laptops are bulletproof I swear. Mine has been all over the world, working from all sorts of places, dropped, manhandled by TSA, etc. and it always fires up lol
First thing I did when I received mine from Woot - before booting it for the first time - was to open it up and replace the spinning drive with an SSD and add an NVMe SSD. Also upped the memory from 12 to 16gb. I use mine mainly for web browsing and an occasional lightweight game.
Glad you went with Ryzen too! Intel has been repackaging the same chips for years (and with backdoors). The Tron Legacy joke of “we put a 12 on the box” couldn’t be more true than with Intel. That’s what makes strange builds like this even possible.
Most motherboards can’t support so many generations of CPUs because there are supposed to be substantial leaps with subsequent generations. It spits in the face of human progress. That isn’t on HP of course as they have no say in this whole thing.
Too bad all the reactions are positive. Can’t we just get 1 thumbs down or such for posts like this?
THIS is helpful. I didn’t notice the lack of speedy ports and that’s the deal breaker for me. I’m not ditching desktop anytime soon and moving stuff back and forth is kind of bread and butter. The resolution is fine, but poor graphics isn’t winning me over either.
I didn’t notice the slow ports either.
I came here to say you can find this laptop with the same configuration elsewhere for the same price. I expect better deals from woot.
I do admit it’s hard to find a decent 17" laptop, even one suited for casual use, for $500. Which is why I’m still thinking about it.
Those ports might be a killer for me too, bc one of the things I want to do with it is digitize a CD collection.
If you’re digitizing optical media, the integrated drive is capable of that. It does have usb 3 (sUpErSpEeD). If not gaming, the integrated graphics means that all of your ram and CPU are left untouched. The 1600x900 also means that it takes less resources to render. Touch adds a lot of cost to mobile screens as well.
The HDMI port with a dedicated graphics card means you have a multimedia machine that can plug into hotel/airBnB TVs as well. I carry a little 6 footer in my travel bag for such an occasion and it’s been wonderful.
It’s not earning a thumbs down and it’s not a great deal by any means. But, for most use cases outside of rendering a ton of video/3D, this will likely make most people pretty happy. Not including a USB-C is just bizarre. It’s a mixed bag still 
USB3 might be fast enough. I’m thinking of how long it takes to move digitized music to a flash drive to play in my car.