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HP sells a wide variety of laptops, and many models come in multiple configurations to meet your performance and budget needs. If you need help finding the right HP laptop, we can help. Here are the top considerations to keep in mind when shopping for a new laptop.
Price
For most people, the search for a new laptop starts with price. If the statistics provided by chipmaker Intel and PC makers are correct, you’ll be holding on to your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to stretch your budget a bit to get better specs, do so. And that’s true whether you spend $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less up front with an eye toward upgrading memory and storage in the future. But laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making components that are easily upgradeable, so again, it’s best to buy as much laptop as you can afford from the start.
Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That might mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design with more expensive materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things contribute to the cost of a laptop. I’d like to say that for $500 you’re getting a powerful gaming laptop, but that’s not the case. Right now, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks is between $700 and $800, with a decent model for creative work or gaming north of $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models at all price points so you can get more laptop for less. And like other vendors, HP is constantly rotating laptop sales on its site.
Mate
If you’re going to be taking your laptop to school, work, or just to your local coffee shop, you’ll want a smaller, lighter laptop — something with a 13-inch or 14-inch display. If you’re buying a laptop for home or work and don’t plan on traveling with it often, you might want to look into a larger 15-inch, 16-inch, or even 17-inch display so you have more room to work, play, and multitask.
Display
When choosing a monitor, there are a lot of things to consider: how much screen you want to display (which, surprisingly, has more to do with resolution than screen size), what kind of content you want to watch, and whether you want to use the display for gaming or creative purposes.
You really want to optimize pixel density; that is, the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. While there are other factors that contribute to sharpness, a higher pixel density generally means sharper display of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen at DPI Calculator (If you don’t feel like calculating it, you can also find the calculations you need to perform there.) As a rule of thumb, we recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch.
Because of the way Windows scales your display, you’re often better off with a higher resolution than you might think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution display, but you can never make them smaller — to fit more content in the frame — on a low-resolution display. For this reason, a 4K, 14-inch display might sound like unnecessary overkill, but it might not be if, say, you want to view a wide spreadsheet.
Text and edges of images may appear blurry on lower-resolution displays. At a minimum, look for a Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, or a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels on laptops with a 16:10 aspect ratio, which are taller than traditional 16:9 widescreen displays and provide more vertical screen space for working without significantly increasing your footprint. A Quad HD (QHD) resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels (2560 x 1600 on a 16:10 display) results in sharper text and images and will probably be sufficient on a 13- or 14-inch laptop display. You don’t necessarily need a 4K display.
Processor
The processor, also known as the CPU, is the brain of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops. Both offer a staggering selection of mobile processors. To complicate matters, both manufacturers have chips designed for different styles of laptops, such as power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions let you know which type is being used. You can go to from Intel or from AMD sites for explanations so that you can get the performance you want. In general, however, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.
Graphic
The graphics processor, or GPU, handles all the work of driving the screen and rendering what’s displayed, as well as accelerating many graphical (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) and discrete (dGPU). As the names suggest, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates with directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.
Because the iGPU shares space, memory, and power with the CPU, it is constrained by its limitations. It’s good for smaller, lighter laptops, but it doesn’t perform nearly as well as a dGPU. In fact, some games and creative software won’t run unless they detect a dGPU or sufficient VRAM. However, most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing, and other non-specialized apps will run just fine on an iGPU.
For graphics-intensive applications like video editing, STEM and design applications, and gaming, you’ll want a dGPU. There are only two companies that actually make them: Nvidia and AMD. Intel also offers models based on its Xe-branded 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 of the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is slower. Many sub-$500 laptops come with 4GB or 8GB, which, combined with a slower drive, can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have the memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers will tell you this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it’s soldered and non-upgradable.
However, some PC manufacturers solder in memory, leaving an empty internal slot to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or look up the full specs of the laptop online to confirm this. And check the web for user reviews, as the slot could still be difficult to access, the memory could be non-standard or hard to come by, or other pitfalls including voiding the warranty.
Storage
You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops, and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. However, not all SSDs are created equal, and cheaper laptops tend to have slower drives; if your laptop only has 8GB of RAM, it may switch to that drive, and your system can quickly slow down while you’re working.
Buy what you can afford, and if you need a smaller drive you can always add an external drive or two or use cloud storage to bolster a small internal drive. The only exception is gaming laptops: we wouldn’t recommend going for anything less than a 512GB SSD unless you’re really into deleting games every time you want to play a new one.
