HP Stream 11-ak0008na 11.6 Inch Laptop (Rose Pink) (Intel Celeron N4000, 2 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC, Office 365 and 1 TB OneDrive Cloud Storage, 1 Year Subscription Included, Windows 10 Home)

Product Information

One more bit of maintenance is recommended, beyond upgrading to full Windows 10: bloatware cleaning. Plenty of preinstalled apps take up too much of the computer’s precious 57GB of available space, including Netflix, Dropbox, LastPass, and McAfee Antivirus. HP’s preinstalled configuration utility, myHP, also constantly sends notifications reminding you to install updates.Thankfully, all of it can and should be uninstalled. On the upside, the HP Stream 14 also comes with a one-year subscription to Microsoft 365, giving users access to Microsoft's suite of programs. We aren't able to get our 3DMark test to run on some extreme-budget laptops, but we were able to get our GFXBench 5.0 benchmark up and running on the HP Stream 14. The same couldn't be said for the other laptops in our comparison (thus we haven't charted those results here), but rest assured that the numbers were as ho-hum as you'd expect. Budget laptops equipped with integrated graphics chips have come a long way, but still can't really play games well, and definitely can't handle anything too graphics intensive. Likewise, the Stream 11's CPU muscle is virtually non-existent as measured by the Cinebench test. Cinebench uses all available CPU cores and threads to render a complex 3D image. It’s the sort of task you’d probably never want to perform on the Stream 11 anyway. What about video encoding? At this point, you might be able to guess, but the HP Stream 14 is not meant for this kind of work. To see how ill-equipped the machine is, we ran HandBrake 1.4, an open-source video transcoder for converting multimedia files to different resolutions and formats. The HP Stream 14 was fighting for its life in this test, taking almost two hours to complete the benchmark. High-end laptops tend to do it in well under 10 minutes. Graphics Tests

Laptops typically need a score of at least 4,000 on this test to be considered excellent, so the Stream 11 is a long way off. Part of the deficiency here may be ascribed to the eMMC storage, whose performance is limited versus the more capable SSDs on more expensive laptops.The dreary numbers continued as we ran Primate Labs’ Geekbench Pro, another CPU stress test meant to simulate real-world applications. The HP Stream 14 came in dead last again, owing its poor performance to its Celeron processor. Forget about running more than a couple of apps at one time while using it.

Other tests that we usually run, including our Handbrake video render, our Photoshop filter test, and 3DMark's graphics trials, were beyond the Stream 11.

A Netbook Throwback

The only way to rectify the Stream 11’s dull screen is to use it plugged into an external monitor. That’s not possible if you’re out and about, but if you’re using this laptop at home, the full-size HDMI port makes it a cinch to connect a larger display. As with the SD card slot, the HDMI port is a welcome addition that's rare even on more expensive laptops. PROCESSOR: Intel Celeron N4020. SCREEN SIZE: 11in. MEMORY: 4GB. STORAGE: 64GB. OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 11 Home. SCREEN TYPE & RESOLUTION: HD (1366 x 768), anti-glare. BLUETOOTH: 5.0. PORTS: USB Type C, 2 USB Type A, HDMI,1 microSD media card reader. GRAPHICS CARD: Intel UHD Graphics 600. BATTERY LIFE: Up to 13.5 hours.