HP 14" Laptop - AMD Athlon Silver 3050U Processor, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, WiFi 5, Bluetooth, Jet Black - Includes Wireless Mouse - Perfect for Students, Remote Work & Everyday Computing

(2023 updated review)This review is for the HP 14-dk1013dx model laptop. I still recommend this laptop as an extreme budget option. The Radeon graphics driver is now working correctly where it wasn't in 2021. I no longer experience any problems using web browsers with hardware acceleration enabled. The Windows 11 experience is quite good and is now free of oddities usually found at this extreme budget price point. Although I should point out I upgraded to a 16GB stick of RAM and that this laptop only supports one stick of ram. The second ram slot on the board appears to be disconnected on this specific model of HP laptop (model 14-dk1013dx). Linux works well without hardware incompatibilities. Fedora 38 with GNOME desktop is what I'm using. Now that there is a 5.15 LTS kernel available, just about any updated Linux distro installer should play well with the RTL8821CE wifi card. I have not experienced any keyboard, trackpad, or display problems. I would still recommend this laptop to people who are on an extreme budget in 2023, but as with any 2023 computer it should be upgraded to at least 8GB ($19) or 16GB ($30) of RAM.(2021 original review)The Bad? And The Fix ?️:Let's get the bad out of the way. This laptop comes with Windows 10 S mode, that means you can only use the built in Windows software and the software on the Windows store. You cannot run normal Windows apps like Discord, Chrome, Firefox, VLC, Steam, etc... It is easy and free to take the laptop out of S mode, but it is completely impossible to go back to S mode if you decide you want to. It is intentionally designed to work that way. The problem is that when you take this laptop out of S mode you will experience hard freezing usually within 30 minutes to an hour sometimes much faster. The laptop must be reset by holding down the power button when this happens. The problem is the graphics driver for the Radeon APU graphics. I do want to say that games run *without* freezing, the freezing problem is only in applications. Some Good News: I found a good fix... which lets me run for weeks without a reboot. I had to disable all "hardware acceleration" settings in all web browsers and other apps, for example Edge, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, and Discord. They are all easy "hardware acceleration" settings to disable in the apps, no weird registry settings or anything complicated. It doesn't seem to make the apps any slower so there's no performance penalty. In the hope that I could fix this issue I upgraded the ram from 4GB to 16GB hoping the small amount of memory was causing the problem. Unfortunately this only made the laptop take longer to freeze up with hardware acceleration enabled.Windows 11 And Linux Support?‍??‍?:This laptop fully supports Windows 11, it has TPM 2.0 and supports Secureboot. I have been running the Windows 11 Beta for weeks now and I have not discovered any problems aside from the Radeon GPU hardware acceleration problem I described earlier. You can expect a smooth upgrade to Windows 11. Linux support is a little more complicated. The Realtek RTL8821CE wireless card in this computer is only supported by kernel versions 5.13.0 and newer. Most Linux distros will not have an installer running on this new of a kernel, so if you don't have access to an ethernet connection then installing a Linux distro will require that you manually download the necessary packages to a USB stick. As of this writing 9/30/2021 your options would be EndeavorOS, Manjaro 21.1.3, and the Beta of Fedora 35 if you want WiFi to work automatically. All three include an installer with a new kernel that supports the RTL8821CE wifi card during install. Ubuntu 21.04 is still using kernel 5.11.0 so it will not work. The next version after 21.04 is set to use kernel 5.13.0 so if that's available when you're reading this then give it a try.Ease of Upgradability?:To install upgrades you will need to take the bottom plastic assembly off, there is no access panel for the ram or the m.2 SSD. The good news is that it's easy to take this laptop apart, that means you won't pay much in labor if you need someone else to do it for you. Pull the two rubber feet strips off and remove 6 phillips screws. Then use a plastic spudger to separate the bottom housing from the top. It takes about five minutes to do this. You will have instant easy access to both the ram and m.2 ssd. The system scanner on the Crucial memory website is what I used to find a compatible ram stick, there are a number of options you can choose from. I got a single 16GB stick, part number CT16G4SFD832A and it works wonderfully.Keyboard, Touchpad, Monitor, Speakers ⌨️???:The keyboard is pretty darn good, there is very little deck flex when pressing the keys, that's a nice quality touch on a budget laptop. WASD works good in games too. The touchpad works well also, two fingered scrolling works well. The touchpad has two good physical buttons and is expectedly small, so you will need to increase the touchpad sensitivity setting if you want to move across the whole screen without lifting your finger off the touchpad. The monitor is 1366x768 but it is surprisingly very functional and I have not encountered issues with this. The quality of the image is also better than I would have expected for a laptop in this price rage. The right side has a standard full sized HDMI port and works great when I want to connect this laptop to my TV. The speakers are decent for the price and are more than loud enough to watch videos or tv. I wouldn't want to listen to music on these speakers but they cover vocal ranges well. There is a standard 3.5mm headphone and mic jack that works well with my earbuds to make Skype calls. I haven't used the webcam or cam mic. The battery goes from 80% to 40% after about 2.5 hours of moderate use playing videos and browsing. This means you won't need to top it off to 100% or drain it down too low, both things that reduce the months and years your battery will function without losing capacity.