Recently, I’ve been deluged with laptops coming in for repair or upgrades. Mind you, I’m not complaining because work is work and it’s what I enjoy. Most of the upgrades are simply a matter of upgrading from spinners (HDDs) to SSDs and increasing memory (RAM), resulting in a significant performance boost. However, some laptops are so cynically designed, with cost-cutting being the major factor, that they’re targeted at customers who know little or nothing about tech, and it’s enough to have me tear my hair out, but I wept instead.
This HP Celeron Laptop Is Waste Of Hard-Earned Money!
This HP Notebook – 14-ck0061la came in the other day because the client wanted to sell it, having already bought a newer model. I can hardly blame her because the specifications are simply ludicrous – Celeron N4000 dual core, 4GB of RAM and a 5400 rpm mechanical hard drive – akin to a potato in reality. But look, here’s how HP describes its wonderful creation:
The HP 14 laptop, with its Intel Celeron processor, handles everyday computing with ease. Whether you’re browsing the web, streaming movies, or working on documents, you’ll find it’s surprisingly snappy. The 4GB of memory ensures smooth multitasking, letting you switch between apps without lag.
Surely that’s a joke? The specifications of this particular laptop, right down to the serial number as shown in the above link, give Windows 10 Home as the OEM OS installed with a warranty expiration date of May 2024, so it’s not exactly ancient, is it? Who in their right mind at HP imagined that a laptop with these paltry specs would be ‘surprisingly snappy’ and ‘without lag’? A bean counter chained to his spreadsheets, I expect!
A Total Lack Of Necessary Resources
On firing up this aberration, I had to wait at least 10 minutes before the logon screen appeared – enough time to make a cup of tea and take my imaginary dog for a walk – only to find that the client had forgotten her password. Fortunately, she had nothing to back up, so I nuked the hard drive and proceeded to clean install Windows 11, which took over an hour. A living nightmare by anyone’s standards.
Furthermore, it only has one memory slot, so upgrading would mean buying a costly 1x8GB DDR4 module – around $40 where I live, plus another $50 if one were to replace the HDD with an SSD. As you can see from the above screenshot of Task Manager, resources are being gobbled up, and when Windows Update kicks in (eventually), those scant resources barely cope, not to mention installing additional programs. Using a laptop with such hopeless specifications is an exercise in masochism, and frankly, the sooner I see the back of it, the better.
Finally, I would always advise those who are not tech savvy and want to buy a computer to consult with someone who knows, instead of being fobbed off with a machine that’s not fit for purpose. The absolute minimum to run Windows smoothly today is 8GB of RAM – 16GB would be preferable – and an SSD, with an NVMe being even better.
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I have two laptops that fall within that category, a Dell Inspiron and a Dell XPS!!! Both have been upgraded to 16GB ram SSD drives. The Dell XPS has two drive slots, and the spinner drive is now a data drive!!! Both laptops run W11 via Flyby11, and both are running well.
Windows was sure pushing the OneDrive cloud update, which I have no use for, so I disabled OneDrive and went into the admin terminal and deleted the entries in the OneDrive folder. End result, no more OneDrive!!!
Dandl
I use One Drive because I have the Office 365 deal, but it’s a pain in the rear with all its nagging!
Cheers
Marc
Thank you for that interesting Article. Question please. How much RAM would you suggest one should have left over before extra should be put in? For example, with 16 GB installed, all regular programs loaded, the RAM left over here is showing / fluctuating between 2 and 4 GB, then is that ok, or would you think more should be put in? I have read somewhere there should always be about 5 Gigs of RAM free. True or false?
Nicke
16GB should be ample!
Right click on the taskbar, bring up task manager and check the percentage memory usage. This also shows you which processes are using said memory and one of the biggest culprits is in start-up programs.
I disable most programs in start-up, except Windows Defender.
There’s a tab on the left in task manager where you can disable start-up programs.
Hope this helps
Marc
Very relevant article especially for so many that are computer illiterate. Unfortunately a lot of the sales people that should know better can’t help with the purchase of a computer either because they don’t care or because they themselves cannot afford the higher end computers to speak from experience.
I’ve often found that the computers suggested by a sales person at a place like Best Buy or Walmart is nowhere near what one would need for the tasks that most are getting accustomed to today like video or image editing.
In the end, articles like yours on Dave’s Tips or youtube are what those like myself end up learning from.
The last time I took advice from a Best Buy employee was 4 years ago where I asked for a powerful computer for my wife that would work smoothly over time as her office software and Windows updated each year. Last year I had to replace the 128G SSD on this $2000 laptop because it was too small and now it cannot upgrade to Windows 11 because it doesn’t fulfill the requirements.