HP sells a wide variety of laptops, and many models are available in multiple configurations to match your performance and budget needs. If you need help finding the right HP laptop, we can help. Here are the main considerations to keep in mind when buying a new laptop.
PRICE
The search for a new laptop for most people starts with price. If the statistics from chipmaker Intel and the PC makers attacking us are correct, you’ll be holding onto your next laptop for at least three years. If you can stretch your budget a bit to get better specs, do it. And that holds whether you’re spending $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less up front with an eye toward improving memory and storage in the future. But laptop manufacturers are increasingly moving away from making components easily replaceable, so again, it’s best to buy as many laptops as you can afford in the first place.
In general, the more you spend, the better the laptop. This could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, stronger build quality, a smaller or lighter design from higher-end materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All these things add to the cost of a laptop. I’d like to say that $500 will get you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but it doesn’t. Right now, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks is between $700 and $800, and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming above $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more laptops for less. And like other retailers, HP is constantly changing the laptop sales on its site.
MAGNITUDE
If you’re going to take your laptop with you to class or work or just to your local coffee shop most mornings, then you’ll want a smaller, lighter laptop — something with a 13-inch or 14-inch screen. If you’re buying a laptop for your home or work and don’t plan on traveling with it with any great frequency, then getting a larger 15-inch, 16-inch, or even 17-inch screen might serve you well. giving you more space to work, play and multitask.
Display
When deciding on a display, there are many considerations: How much you need to display (which surprisingly has more to do with resolution than screen size), what types of content you’ll be viewing, and whether you’ll be using it for gaming or creative endeavors.
You really want to optimize pixel density; that is, the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. Although there are other factors that contribute to sharpness, a higher pixel density usually means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen in the DPI Calculator if you don’t feel like doing the math, and you can also find out what math you need to do there.) We recommend a pixel pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch as a general rule.
Because of the way Windows can scale the screen, you’re often better off with a higher resolution than you think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller — to fit more content on view — on a low-resolution screen. That’s why a 4K, 14-inch screen might sound like an unnecessary overkill, but it might not be if you need to, say, look at a wide spreadsheet.
Text and image edges may appear blurry on a lower resolution screen. Look for a Full HD resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels at a minimum — or a resolution of 1,920×1,200 pixels on laptops with 16:10 aspect ratios that are taller than traditional 16:9 widescreen displays and offer more vertical screen space for work without significantly increasing the footprint. A Quad HD (QHD) resolution of 2,560×1,440 pixels (2,560×1,600 on a 16:10 screen) will result in sharper text and images and is likely enough for a 13- or 14-inch laptop screen – – Doesn’t necessarily need a 4K screen.
maker
The processor, otherwise known as the CPU, is the brain of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU manufacturers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as a new third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Intel and AMD offer an amazing selection of mobile processors. Making matters more complicated, both manufacturers have chips designed for different laptop styles, such as energy-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will let you know what type is used. You can refer to Intel or AMD sites for explanations in order to get the performance you want. In general, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.
Battery life, however, has less to do with the number of cores and more to do with the architecture of the CPU, ARM vs. x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus computers we’ve tested offer better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.
Graphics
The graphics processor, or GPU, handles all the work of driving the screen and generating what’s displayed, as well as speeding up many graphics-related (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). As the names imply, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates directly with, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.
Because the iGPU shares space, memory, and power with the CPU, it is limited by their limits. It allows for smaller and lighter laptops, but doesn’t perform as well as a dGPU. In fact, there are some games and creative software that won’t run unless they detect a sufficient dGPU or VRAM. However, most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing, and other non-specialized applications will run just fine on an iGPU.
For more power-hungry graphics needs, like video editing, STEM and design applications, and gaming, you’ll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some based on Xe-brand iGPU technology (or the older UHD Graphics brand) in its CPUs.
Memory
For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM, with 8GB being the absolute minimum. RAM is where the operating system stores all data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is slower. Many laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which, along with a slower drive, can make for an extremely slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have the memory attached to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is bundled and cannot be upgraded.
However, some computer manufacturers will bundle the memory and also leave an empty internal slot to add a RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or find the full specifications of the laptop online to confirm. And check the web for user experiences, because the slot may still be hard to come by, may require non-standard or hard-to-obtain memory, or other pitfalls, including voiding the warranty .
Storage
You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have replaced all hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. But not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheaper laptops usually have slower drives; if the laptop only has 8GB of RAM, it can end up swapping with that drive and the system can quickly slow down while you’re working.
Get what you can afford, and if you need to go with a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two down the road or use cloud storage to beef up a small internal drive. The only exception is gaming laptops: We don’t recommend using an SSD smaller than 512GB, unless you really like uninstalling games every time you want to play a new game.
