HP ENVY 15-ah100na Laptop from student store reduced to £289.
If you cant sign up as a student you can get the laptop from the main HP website for £314 using HP 10% off code for this laptop ENVY.
Also may be further 6% off through Quidco.
Its an AMD Quad-Core A10-8700P APU with Radeon™ R6 Graphics. From reviews processor is similar in speed to i5 but the graphics card allows some game usage.
Some reports of WifI issues but bios/intel driver reported to have solved this.
Was looking for i5 laptop for my daughter but figured this was comparable to the £300 models advertised but with better build quality.
All comments (33)
bestbuy123
16 Aug 16#1
This is good laptop for students on a budget. The best thing about this laptop is the back-lit keyboard that is a only really seen in higher end laptops, also decent specs too.
plewis00 to bestbuy123
16 Aug 161#5
I dunno about the 'best thing' being the backlit keyboard! I would probably say it's the metal chassis and lid, or the 1080p display!
Am not totally sold on AMD processors for my own machines and the touchpad on these ENVY computers are awful - I think it's where I've grown up resting my right thumb on what would've previously been the left-button but HP insist on building rubbish touchpads - Apple and Dell can get it right, why can't HP?
tdk2bu
16 Aug 16#2
anyone know how good this is compared to i5 5200u processor? mixed information online.
dragon2611 to tdk2bu
16 Aug 161#4
Depends what you want to use it for, I wouldn't reccomend it for gaming but it's got enough grunt for browsing the web/ playing video.etc
I got one mainly for a cheap laptop with a 1080p display as I found 1376x768 to be to low res for the stuff I wanted to do, Bit of a pain but not majorly difficult to get at the harddrive.
I replaced the stock HDD with an SSD pretty much as soon as I got mine (Powered it up first to see if it worked before taking it to bits) also upped the RAM to 12GB (I had a 4GB DDR3 module spare)
I often have multiple browser tabs open, outlook, Lync.etc and RoyalTS and it seems to keep up ,
Only thing I did notice is windows 10 defaults to 125% scaling for some reason, I set it back down which works fine, some stuff is a bit small (Glad I didn't got for a more expensive machine with a 4K screen, wouldn't be able to see anything)
Oh and also it's quite large for a 15" laptop, on the plus side that does mean you get a full Numpad however.
Any other more higher end laptops there? Gtx 950m/960m????
tdk2bu
16 Aug 16#6
cheers appreciate your input
fiendishlyclever
17 Aug 16#7
I've got a HP envy although it's not this model ( HP muddy the waters by using the brand name Envy on half the stuff they produce). The aluminium body is a premium finish but makes it feel like a brick in comparison to a similarly sized plastic ultrabook from work. The build quality feels similar to our Macbook Pro although the keyboard/trackpad are nowhere near as good. I used to have wi-fi dropouts but recent updates seem to have fixed this.
plewis00
17 Aug 16#8
Fully agree, but plastic ultrabooks just don't feel good, you can't pick them up without feeling they're going to collapse under their own weight (what do you have/use?). HP definitely overuse the sub-brand 'ENVY' - it used to mean premium materials and hardware, HP realised people liked and bought it for that and then cleverly decided to use it on everything thinking it would fool the public... touchpad really is awful, where the cursor goes bears no correlation to where you want or expect.
fiendishlyclever
17 Aug 16#9
Agreed - I forgot to mention that my three year old plastic ultrabook no longer has a flat base but rocks as you use it! I don't anticipate my Envy doing this :smiley:
cvsmjd
17 Aug 16#10
Well mines arrived under 24Hrs which i think is pretty good. Hope my daughter appreciates it!
Dragon2611 how easy was the SSD install?
dragon2611 to cvsmjd
17 Aug 16#11
I think there was a video on youtube somewhere, essentially remove all the screws at the bottom then use a pry tool or some such to pry the bottom off (I used a screwdriver which isn't the best way as it did leave a small scratch, once you've got the first few clips to release you should be able to pull it off fairly easily) then gently remove the ribbon across the battery to the back of the HDD caddy (it's stuck down and quite delicate so you'll have to be careful)
Then you'll need to detach the battery as it's covering a screw to the HDD bay.
There a couple of screws for the HDD thats covered by one of the speaker cables but there's enough slack to just move that to one side, just be careful when putting it back in not to catch it in the screw/crush it.
Other than being careful around the ribbon cable and battery and there being quite a lot of screws it's pretty straight forward.
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Opening post
If you cant sign up as a student you can get the laptop from the main HP website for £314 using HP 10% off code for this laptop ENVY.
Also may be further 6% off through Quidco.
Its an AMD Quad-Core A10-8700P APU with Radeon™ R6 Graphics. From reviews processor is similar in speed to i5 but the graphics card allows some game usage.
Some reports of WifI issues but bios/intel driver reported to have solved this.
Was looking for i5 laptop for my daughter but figured this was comparable to the £300 models advertised but with better build quality.
All comments (33)
Am not totally sold on AMD processors for my own machines and the touchpad on these ENVY computers are awful - I think it's where I've grown up resting my right thumb on what would've previously been the left-button but HP insist on building rubbish touchpads - Apple and Dell can get it right, why can't HP?
I got one mainly for a cheap laptop with a 1080p display as I found 1376x768 to be to low res for the stuff I wanted to do, Bit of a pain but not majorly difficult to get at the harddrive.
I replaced the stock HDD with an SSD pretty much as soon as I got mine (Powered it up first to see if it worked before taking it to bits) also upped the RAM to 12GB (I had a 4GB DDR3 module spare)
I often have multiple browser tabs open, outlook, Lync.etc and RoyalTS and it seems to keep up ,
Only thing I did notice is windows 10 defaults to 125% scaling for some reason, I set it back down which works fine, some stuff is a bit small (Glad I didn't got for a more expensive machine with a 4K screen, wouldn't be able to see anything)
Oh and also it's quite large for a 15" laptop, on the plus side that does mean you get a full Numpad however.
Dragon2611 how easy was the SSD install?
Then you'll need to detach the battery as it's covering a screw to the HDD bay.
There a couple of screws for the HDD thats covered by one of the speaker cables but there's enough slack to just move that to one side, just be careful when putting it back in not to catch it in the screw/crush it.
Other than being careful around the ribbon cable and battery and there being quite a lot of screws it's pretty straight forward.