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.
Latest comments (33)
snatch_master
8 Sep 16#33
Has anyone updated the BIOS/Intel Drivers on this? Wifi seems OK and the latest downloadable BIOS is F.14 (which includes wifi fix) and my BIOS is already at F.15. Talk to me Goose.
wavecrest1
1 Sep 16#32
I bought one of these on the HP corporate perks scheme. 289, delivered inc VAT.
The trackpad is OK - as good as the Lenovo one; Machine is fast; and WIFI has been absolutely rock solid on both 2.4 & 5Gig. The 1TB disk feels slow but not objectionally slow.
Screen has tight viewing angles in both vertical and horizontal planes but then again, it is just a laptop. Colours could be a bit more vibrant however.
Overall, I am very pleased.
mamoulian
1 Sep 16#31
Mine arrived today... pleased with it so far.
It only gets one user at once so viewing angle not a problem.
It was set to 125% zoom, I changed to 100% and went through the ClearType font wizard thing. You have to log out for that to take effect properly.
Trackpad seems fine to me, I usually lift finger and tap the pad rather than clicking the button so the Mac-esque 'click the whole pad' thing hasn't bothered me. It seems only very slightly less good than one on a Macbook Air - you can't click near the top of those very well either. It uses the Synaptics control panel which has a ton of options for sensitivity, disabling movement on click, and multi finger gestures. I ramped up the sensitivity along with the two finger scroll speed and it's fine.
Not noticed any WiFi issues in a couple of hours of downloading and installing things.
Pleasantly surprised by the HP bloatware, not much seems to be running other than their update tool which will be useful for driver updates that don't come from Windows Update. Maybe it does BIOS too, it said I have a higher version than I could see listed on their website - F.15.
I might have to consider an SSD upgrade, these Windows updates are taking an age! Not its fault though, SSD laptops cost a lot more than £50 more.
Also of note: gf used it for most of the afternoon and hasn't complained about anything. AFAIK she's never used one of these clicky trackpads before.
Thanks @cvsmjd !
slinkydonkey
29 Aug 16#30
Ok I mean for £300 still a good deal!
dragon2611
29 Aug 16#29
It's not great, kind of like they tried to emulate a macbook trackpad but failed, I usually plug a mouse in so it doesn't bother me that much.
slinkydonkey
29 Aug 16#28
Ok but it looks like the same chasis so it will likely have the same poor touch pad as described. Perhaps someone who has bought it can tell us how good the touchpad is please?
slinkydonkey
29 Aug 16#26
Thanks for the link the code didnt work for me anyway...I have been put of this laptop by this reveiw :http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/laptops-and-netbooks/hp-envy-15-2015-1297108/review
dragon2611 to slinkydonkey
29 Aug 16#27
That review is for one of the intel ones afaik as this one doesn't have a DVD drive or the fingerprint reader
Is there a limit to how many laptops a student can get?
slinkydonkey
29 Aug 16#23
Do you think this laptop could play Company of Heroes 2?
slinkydonkey
29 Aug 16#22
Where are you guys seeing this 10% Discount?
mamoulian
28 Aug 161#21
Just ordered this, it is indeed £299 now but still worth it. I would have preferred an SSD but the cheapest 15" 1080 with one is around £430 so not worth it.
Thanks to @dr3w for the tip, I'm not a student but HP are in my employer's benefits scheme.
Looking forward to see who gets the exciting job of removing the HP bloatware, reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch (DVD freely downloadable from MS), or installing Linux.
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.
Just wanted to add that if you work for a big company you can use your 'Corporate Perks' pages to access the 'HP Employee Benefit Store' - means you can it for £289 same as the student price.
cvsmjd
18 Aug 16#15
Will have a go with Bios and intel drivers at the weakened then.
cheers
dragon2611
17 Aug 16#13
Yeh I did, and the intel drivers (although I'd used a clean install of windows without all the HP stuff)
Only thing I've found with the Wi-Fi card is my bluetooth mouse doesn't work very well when there's a lot of Wi-Fi traffic, probably due to it being a 1x1:1 combo card.
cvsmjd
17 Aug 16#12
Cheers may hold off for Cheers, i'll see how she gets on with the standard drive. did you upgrade the bios ?
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.
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:
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#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.
tdk2bu
16 Aug 16#6
cheers appreciate your input
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?
Alvie
16 Aug 161#3
Any other more higher end laptops there? Gtx 950m/960m????
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.
Latest comments (33)
The trackpad is OK - as good as the Lenovo one; Machine is fast; and WIFI has been absolutely rock solid on both 2.4 & 5Gig. The 1TB disk feels slow but not objectionally slow.
Screen has tight viewing angles in both vertical and horizontal planes but then again, it is just a laptop. Colours could be a bit more vibrant however.
Overall, I am very pleased.
It only gets one user at once so viewing angle not a problem.
It was set to 125% zoom, I changed to 100% and went through the ClearType font wizard thing. You have to log out for that to take effect properly.
Trackpad seems fine to me, I usually lift finger and tap the pad rather than clicking the button so the Mac-esque 'click the whole pad' thing hasn't bothered me. It seems only very slightly less good than one on a Macbook Air - you can't click near the top of those very well either. It uses the Synaptics control panel which has a ton of options for sensitivity, disabling movement on click, and multi finger gestures. I ramped up the sensitivity along with the two finger scroll speed and it's fine.
Not noticed any WiFi issues in a couple of hours of downloading and installing things.
Pleasantly surprised by the HP bloatware, not much seems to be running other than their update tool which will be useful for driver updates that don't come from Windows Update. Maybe it does BIOS too, it said I have a higher version than I could see listed on their website - F.15.
I might have to consider an SSD upgrade, these Windows updates are taking an age! Not its fault though, SSD laptops cost a lot more than £50 more.
Also of note: gf used it for most of the afternoon and hasn't complained about anything. AFAIK she's never used one of these clicky trackpads before.
Thanks @cvsmjd !
One of the others might, or they might not stack with the student discount, I didn't try: http://www.hotukdeals.com/vouchers/store.hp.com?vb=130955
Thanks to @dr3w for the tip, I'm not a student but HP are in my employer's benefits scheme.
Looking forward to see who gets the exciting job of removing the HP bloatware, reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch (DVD freely downloadable from MS), or installing Linux.
I considered the Pavillion at Currys: http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-pavilion-15-aw065sa-15-6-laptop-silver-currys-2502567
but think this Envy has the edge due to the CPU, aluminium build, cost and HP discount.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2542&cmp[]=2841
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.
cheers
Only thing I've found with the Wi-Fi card is my bluetooth mouse doesn't work very well when there's a lot of Wi-Fi traffic, probably due to it being a 1x1:1 combo card.
Cheers, i'll see how she gets on with the standard drive. did you upgrade the bios ?
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.
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?