HP 14: Review: What It’s Like to Use a $300 Windows Laptop

It’s 2023 and my tireless search for a sub-$500 Windows laptop that isn’t a flaming pile of garbage continues. While I’ve long maintained that people who are limited to that category should just get Chromebooks, I understand that this recommendation is making quite a few people very, very angry.

So I come to you today from the HP 14, a 14-inch silver laptop we bought from Amazon for $289. It has an 11th Gen Core i3 processor (yes, it’s an older chip, but that’s why it’s so cheap – that’s life), 4GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. This is about as cheap as a Windows laptop can get. (HP’s listed MSRP for this model is $469.99, but you can get it for much less without much hassle.) And to see if it’s a viable budget buy, I spent a full work day on the device, from morning to evening.

Spoiler alert: wasn’t it horrible? I mean it wasn’t great. But I was surprised how well it went.

First thing in the morning, I turned on the HP 14 and tried to load the various programs I use in review testing: Chrome, Slack, Spotify, Steam, display calibration stuff, and the like. (As much as Microsoft teases me about it, I won’t be switching to Edge, monsters.) I couldn’t do any of this because the HP 14, it turned out, came out of the box in S mode. Well, that didn’t fly. I turned that off quickly. The world didn’t end; the laptop continued to work just fine.

With that out of the way, I started my workday with about 10 Chrome tabs and Slack open. The first time I tried this, a few things got stuck, so I ended up restarting the computer. This seemed to solve the problem it was having. Some things never change.

From then on, I was impressed with how well the Core i3 handled my workload. There was no point in feeling really constrained or having to avoid having to open extra tabs to avoid lag. It wasn’t fast, to be clear, but I could get everything I needed done with minimal thumb movements.

I made several video calls through Google Meet using the “HP TrueVision HD” camera above my Chrome tabs, and they actually went through without any stutter or lag (which is much more than I can say for many other cheap laptops). Colleagues told me my video feed was grainy and they couldn’t make out too much detail, but there was no lag or disruptive processing on my end.

The fans started spinning when I first opened Chrome, but they were surprisingly quiet after that. They were huffing for sure, but they were much more polite about it than the fans of many premium laptops (*cough* Dell XPS).

Another thing I noticed while working was that I Real like the keyboard. It’s quite bouncy with a generous click and plenty of room. You’ll even find HP’s signature row of shortcut keys on the left for Page Up, Page Down, and the like. Over there is quite a bit of flex in the plastic chassis (what did you expect – it’s $289), and my typing slightly depressed the keyboard, but that’s not something that generally bothers me as much as some of you.

The worst part of the experience, honestly, was scrolling. The touchpad is small. I have pretty small fingers and I still got plastic when I tried to flip pages down quickly. It’s also not the easiest or most comfortable thing in the world to be depressing about, so keep that in mind. I wouldn’t recommend it for people with limited mobility (or this chassis in general, as the lid can’t be opened with one hand and can be a bit stubborn even with two hands).

At noon I took a short break to eat and watch for a few minutes Succession. (I’m still catching up from last weekend, so don’t spoil it.) The episode was quite watchable on the 1920 x 1080 screen, which is a higher resolution than most sub-$400 Windows laptops I didn’t see any colors that seemed off or faded; brightness was a bit dim but works fine for indoor use. The bigger obstacle to media consumption on this device, frankly, was the speakers, which I generally had to keep at max volume to hear everything accurately. I wouldn’t attempt to make calls with this device outdoors or in a high background noise environment; you may find yourself needing to lean.

I worked on some photos (which I took for this review) in the afternoon. And would you take a look at that – there’s an SD slot! I couldn’t be happier with this given the number of very expensive laptops I’ve reviewed over the past few months that have no ports at all. And the device lasted about six and a half hours on a charge, which should honestly make some much more expensive 14-inch laptops take a good look at themselves.

But the evening was the biggest surprise. I went to a friend’s house, and after much deliberation about what to do, we decided to settle in for an old-fashioned game Civilization V. I could have dropped the HP 14 for a Zephyrus or whatever, but I stayed true to my mandate. We loaded Civilization V on my test unit and took it for a spin.

You know what? It actually ran a bit. We dialed the game down to the absolute lowest settings and we got a solid 30 frames per second. Now it’s very good that we didn’t settle Overexpected because you wouldn’t want to use this device for a title with any kind of action. But for a relaxed, low-key turn-based game of building granaries, exploring mining, trading whales, and occasionally destroying cities, it worked just fine.

Now, I must necessarily recommend that you buy this? If you can afford something with more storage, a brighter screen, a larger touchpad, and a better-looking and better-built case, no. But if you need Windows, and you need Windows for less than $300, voilà. Here’s a device that works just fine, comes with some semblance of integrated graphics inside, and even has a port selection that won’t make you sneeze. Here, I found it. I’m going to use something else now.

Photography by Monica Chin / The Verge