HP Notebook 15-ba009dx Review

Look, I do not expect a ton of a notebook that's less than $ 300. To do something at that price, you have to cut corners somewhere. But the HP 15-ba009dx notebook cuts corners almost everywhere, from cheap build quality to low-screen display to battery life that is less than half the length of your closest competitors. Sure, your speakers sound good, but you can get a laptop that cuts less corners elsewhere, and I recommend you do it.

Design

It should not be a surprise that this cheap laptop really feels, well, cheap. It is made of black plastic, and the ribbed lid with the HP logo has a lot of flex when pressed down. Lifting the cover reveals the 15.6-inch screen, 1366 x 768; An island style keyboard with a numeric keypad; And a black cover with some racing stripes. The black plastic edges around the cover are sharper than I expected, which caused me some writing problems (see below).

At 4.6 lbs and 15.1 x 10 x 1 inches, it's an average size for a 15-inch budget. The Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM is 5 lbs and 15 x 10.2 x 1.2 inches. The 14 inch Dell Inspiron 14 3000 is 3.5 pounds and 13.6 x 9.6 x 0.9 inches.

The left side of the laptop has an Ethernet connector, an HDMI output, a headphone jack and a pair of USB 2.0 ports. On the right is a USB 3.0 port, an SD card reader and a DVD drive.

Display

Dim and Boring is the name of the game with the 15.6-inch screen, 1366 x 768 of the HP Notebook 15. When I saw a trailer of The Big Sick in 1080p, I could not distinguish most of the facial features of the characters in a dark room, And a scene in a hospital was blown by the light coming in from the windows. The blue and red shirts of the town were all silenced.

The HP Notebook covered only 70 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is well below the 94 percent average for conventional notebooks. The Inspiron and Aspire were more alive in 81 percent and 159 percent, respectively.

It has a Delta-E score of 1.3 (0 is ideal), so its colors are more accurate than some competitors. The average is 2.1, while the Inspiron (3.4) and the Aspire E (6.2) were much less accurate.

The HP notebook's display is dim at only 174 nits, but it's brighter than the 135-nit deception on the Inspiron. The average is 277 nits brighter, and the Acer measured 215 nits.

Keyboard and Touchpad

I wrote my usual 107 words per minute on the keyboard of the HP Notebook 15, but it was not pleasant. The keys are superficial with only 1.2 millimeters of travel and 71 grams of force necessary to press, and cheap plastic gave them a hollow feeling. The edge of the palm rest is sharp and digs into your arms if you are not careful.

The touchpad feels plasticky and cheap, but it is enough. I used it to navigate Windows 10 without any problem, although some multitouch gestures, such as activating Cortana with three fingers, took a few attempts.

Audio

For a cheap laptop, the HP speakers were pretty decent. When I heard "Waving Through a Window," from the soundtrack to "Dear Evan Hansen," Ben Platt's voice was clear and strong enough to fill our small conference room.

While the violins were also clear, the bass and the rest of the orchestra were quite soft. In the DTS Audio Control application, there are options for focusing on voice or movie playback, but I was perfectly happy to leave it alone in the default music mode.

Performance

With its AMD A6-7310 2 GHz CPU, Radeon R4 Graphics, 4GB RAM and 500GB, 5,400 rpm HDD, the Notebook 15 is not exactly the computer of the person who works. In my tests, I occasionally stammered just trying to open the file manager, and I could not keep up with my writing on the 10fastfingers.com typing test. I had 10 tabs open in Google Chrome when I started to see the delay when switching between them.

It also does not use 802.11ac, the latest Wi-Fi standard, so you will not get the fastest Internet speeds.

The laptop scored a score of 3,291 on the Geekbench 4 performance test, which outperformed the Inspiron (1,807, Intel Celeron N3060), but was not as good as the Aspire (5.408, Intel Core i3-7100U) or the average of the Category (10,897).

It took the computer 2 minutes and 7 seconds to copy 4.97GB of mixed media files, a rate of 40.1MBps. The Inspiron (27.9MBps) and the Aspire (36.6MBps) were both faster. The average mainstream notebook is much faster at 210.5Mbps.

It took 11 minutes and 40 seconds for the HP laptop to match 20,000 names and addresses in our OpenOffice spreadsheet. The Inspiron was even slower (13:33), but the Aspire took only 5:14. The mainstream portable average only takes 3:58.

Battery duration

Keep the Notebook 15 near a charger at all times. It lasted only 3 hours and 36 minutes in the Battery Magician Laptop Test, which continuously browses the web through Wi-Fi. The overall average is 6:51, which the Inspiron (9:01) and Aspire (8:16) both exceeded.

Webcam

What a mess. The 640 x 360 webcam takes fuzzy and pixelated images that are not even suitable for Skyping with a friend. In a shot I took on my desk, I looked so blurry and pixilated that I had to make sure there was no Cling Wrap on the camera. The lights behind me were all turned off, and the colors were not as vivid as they appeared in real life.

Hot

Whether it's on your desk or on your lap, the laptop 15 will stay fresh. In our tests, the laptop never exceeded our comfort threshold of 95 degrees after transmitting 15 minutes of HD video from YouTube. The background measured 88 degrees Fahrenheit, the keyboard between the G and H keys measured 87 degrees and the touchpad was 81 degrees.

Software and Warranty

Unfortunately, it will take a little time if you want to uninstall all of the pre-packaged bloatware in Notebook 15. Garbage includes McAfee LiveSafe, WildTangent Games, Simple Mahjong, and shortcuts for Amazon.com and Priceline.com, among others. That's the best of all the Windows 10 machines that make you deal, like Netflix, Twitter, Candy Crush: Soda Saga and Royal Revolt 2.

HP does include some useful utilities, though. Amateur videographers can appreciate CyberLink's suite of video editing tools, while HP Orbit pairs their laptop and smartphone to share files. The pre-loaded Dropbox application gives you 25GB of space for a year if you log on to the laptop.

HP sells the 15-ba009dx laptop with a one-year warranty. See how the company did in our best and worst brand classification and technical support clash.

Bottom line

I do not expect budget notebooks to offer performance, screens or even top-notch design, but the HP Notebook 15-ba009dx is unsurpassed at almost every level. It lasts less than 4 hours on a charge, has a dim and soft display, a flat keyboard and a plastic case with significant giving on the top. It does not even support the latest Wi-Fi standard.

Ninety dollars is a lot of money, but spending that much more gets you much more. The $ 350 Acer Aspire E 15 5-575-33BM offers you a 1080p display, larger hard drive, Wi-Fi AC and an Intel Core i3 CPU. Lasts more than 8 hours on one charge, too. Not perfect, but the differences are impressive. The Dell Inspiron 14 3000 for $ 230 has much less storage (only 32 GB), but if you do not save documents, photos, music or video on your laptop, it will last at least 9 hours with a charge. There are options at this price point, and you should consider notepad 15.