Been very pleased. Loaded my licensed copies of Adobe Creative Suite 5 and Office 2007 just fine. Upgrade to Windows 10 went smoothly and is working great.
The battery seems to be a dud that does not hold a charge well, but that is not a deal breaker for my circumstance but YMMV. Did not come with a webcam but did include a fingerprint reader.
I would not hesitate to buy this again at this price.
I bought one of these recently through woot, but mine had the SSD drive. I did put another 4GB of RAM in it for about $20.00. Cosmetically, there were no issues. Mine did not come with any bloatware. I did not upgrade to Windows 10. No intention to. I’m pretty happy with the machine overall. It’s a good run of the mill laptop with pretty snappy performance, in my opinion.
I purchased this exact model about 8 months ago. It’s run everything I have thrown at it, but I have not done any gaming with it. I upgraded the HDD to an SSD about a month ago just for the performance boost on the disk access. Despite Voltron’s warnings about HPs in general, it was an easy swap and took about 10 minutes. Battery life was reasonable for the age at about 2 hours or so.
I too bought during the last round. A few things to point out:
Comes with a short warranty from the refurbisher. I had a bad dvdrom and got a replacement dvd writer within a few days.
I got one that has discreet AMD graphics AND the 1600x900 display.
Comes preloaded with fresh Windows 7 pro. Zero HP bloatware. You can download newest drivers and software (like battery checker) from HP.
My recovery partition is not functional (hitting f11 on boot does nothing). After a brief chat with HP rep, I was mailed new driver and win 7 dvd media at no cost.
I updated the BIOS to F61 with no issues.
I replaced the 4 GB RAM with 16 GB from Amazon and switched to a 240 GB SDD I had laying around.
Upgraded to i7-2860qm off ebay. The thermal pad on the video chip is quite thick. After reinstalling, the thermal paste I used was not thick enough to contact the heatsink so I switched back to the pad. Not ideal, but it works.
Ordered an ebay ultrabay tray for anothwr hard drive. The one I ordered requires a swap of the rear bracket and front face plate off the DVD. It was under $10 and should arrive this week.
Has USB3, USB2 and e-sata port, firewire and full size display port. No hdmi, but a DP to HDMI adapter is $10.
The unit was very decent when I got it with a single small scratch. This is a brick of a laptop though. Its not too heavy but its thick. There are probably other good options out there that are similar (older lenovo t420/430 comes to mind). My xps ultrabook is 3/4 the thickneas buy doesnt have an optical drive. Good build quality surpassing most modern consumer laptops.
Upgrades are easy. The bottom panel slides off with a latch mechanism for Easy RAM, drive and processor access. You do need a small philps screwdriver to remove the optical drive though which is a bit lame. There is NO msata slot on the PCI-e for an mSATA SSD. The open msata slot is for a mobile broadband card. I believe that the BIOS is locked so the WWAN cards are limited an I think only 3G. Just use the hotspot feature on your phone.
After upgrades, it is now an absolute beast. I played some games on it and will try photoshop elements once I find my disk. Office/web/facebook are all easy even in the config it shipped with. I probably would have not upgraded and passed this along to someone else if it didnt have the higher resolution display.
Running OSX should be very simple as there are lots of guides for this unit. The Intel wifi needs to be replaced but the one I bought for my dell xps was about $15 off ebay. I should be able to install OSX on a drive in the ultrabay and have a simple Win7/Yosemite setup running on separate disks.
If I bought a new laptop with a 240 GB SSD, new i5 (which should be as fast as the old i7) and 16 GB RAM it would cost $1000+. I invested about $120 on top of the purchase price since I had the drives already. It seems to be a good option if you have hardware laying around.
With that said, thanks for the input. But I would like to counter. I think DELL wins on making consumer products being much harder to repair. My kids Dell died a year ago. Unit was three years old and already went through two screen replacements and one keyboard replacement. Glad I purchased the IN HOME warranty as she was in college and they met her on the campus to fix the laptop once, in my house the next. Screen died for the last time and I decided to just replace the unit with my back up (I had purchased a Toshiba from Office Max for like 250 bucks after rebates and discounts (it orig was 600… thank god for holiday deals). But I went to take the drive out of the Dell. 500 screws later and keyboard, CPU cooling, half the boards in it removed, I got the drive out. No more flipping it over and taking out 4 screws and pulling the darn thing out. I just scrapped the whole POS laptop and vowed to never buy Dell-Junk again.
As far as HP goes. I have a HP laptop I got in 2010. I’ve maxed out the memory, installed a 512gb SSD drive and to this day it’s NEVER failed me. Got it when I went back to school to take some updated IT classes. It came with a 9cell battery (extended) and I got a 2nd battery as back up. Love the 6+ hours of use. I have 2 HP printers and I use a HP workstation Z200 as my media server. We use HP exclusively at work (both workstations, desktops and laptops). Again, as desktop support, I can’t say anything bad about them. Some of these units are in facilities that would kill most other electronic equipment but these things seem to keep chugging along. Sorry you had such a bad experience with HP but I’ve had the opposite experience and we both seem to be in the same field.
I’m curious about this system, been looking to upgrade over my Chromebook, so this thing will take 16 GB RAM? Is it really that hard to change the SSD? Really just looking for a PC with basic capabilities, would like to play Starcraft 2 and Diablo III.
These look like the old Navy laptops that are in the process of being upgraded to new ones. Let’s hope so since most people didn’t take them off their docking station over the 2-3 years.
Just to add: bought one last time around, and spent a leisurely hour unloading some of the junk they left behind. Works like a charm; I wouldn’t hesitate to buy another one.
I got a very similar 8470P from Woot about a month ago. It’s very nice for an older, slightly chunky laptop. The $80 difference in price is probably worth the upgrade in CPU, RAM, and SSD, but for $200 this is still a solid laptop.
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