A few months ago near the end of August, I was shopping around for a laptop for college (Computer Science Major), I'd researched a few different laptops, but none really caught my eye like this one did. In short, it is a beautiful looking laptop that is incredibly light. The Best Buy rep at the store was very helpful in getting me the student discount and sale discount, with made me very happy. I took this laptop home and was excited to use it for the upcoming semester. I was very impressed with its clear, bright, full HD touch screen and comfortable keyboard, and good performance with its ssd and Ryzen cpu. I wish I could have gone on more about how I like this laptop, but a glaring issue and serious oversight by hp has made owning this thing a nightmare. About a month into my ownership of the laptop, the WiFi adapter began to give out. At the end of September I began to notice that the WiFi would randomly disconnect for about a minute. No big deal, I thought, I thought that maybe the signal dropped in my room for some reason, or maybe a hiccup in the drivers caused me to disconnect. However, over the next few days, the rate of the WiFi disconnects increased exponentially, up to a point where it would connect for about 15 seconds, then disconnect for 30, and not show any available networks. Of course this made the laptop virtually unusable, frustrated, this began my troubleshooting. I tried everything from updating windows, updating drivers, rolling back updates, updating the BIOS, running hardware diagnostics, and even resetting the computer to factory settings. Looking into windows event viewer showed me that the problem was the Intel Dual Band Wirelesss AC 7265 WiFi adapter. (see screenshot 1) Hours of troubleshooting did absolutely nothing to fix it, leaving me with only one option: sending my laptop to hp for repair. I contacted customer service, went through the usual questions, "did you reset windows?", "did you run the diagnostic tool?" etc. and eventually got sent a shipping box via expedited overnight shipping (nice!). I sent the laptop in along with a detailed summary of what I'd already tried and waited the usual 5 business days only to get it back.......still broken (not nice..) You can see screenshot 2 and see that the same errors in event viewer were popping up. According to the repair report they sent with the laptop, they replaced the wireless adapter, which is what I believed to be the problem too. Which at this point meant that I either got very unlucky and got another faulty adapter, or, that part wasn't the issue in the first place. Cue the customer service call... After an hour long customer service phone call trying to explain that my problem wasn't fixed the first time, I was sent another box, and another day later I send my laptop back, and a week later......well nothing. (By the way, apparently they can't actually just replace my laptop until after it's sent in for repairs 3 times within a year. Great policies right??) I still don't have my laptop back, and it's been 2 more weeks. And as of today (10/30) will be another week, totaling a month of me not having it. My repair has already been delayed twice without explanation. The customer service rep only tells me that it's pending repair, giving me no new info. So all in all, I've been WITHOUT my $700 laptop for as l have been with it. Absolutely unacceptable as a student and Computer Science major who needs access to a computer literally every single day. HP really needs to get their quality control department together and test these PC's longer before they release them. So if you wan't to take a risk and buy this laptop, the specs are good, the design is nice, and its fast for its price range, however, you are still taking a risk of getting faulty hardware. Unfortunately for myself, I was one of the unlucky ones.

This laptop does everything I need. It run efficiently and it's lightweight and portable. The screen is crisp and clear.

In my opinion, this laptop is pretty cool! I love the awesome features it contains. It's really durable and great for college students like myself. I would definitely recommend this laptop, if you want something close to a MacBook with a cheaper price.

Getting started with the HP Envy is very straightforward just like other HP laptops. It runs Windows 10 so all the start up functions run in the background while you watch a temperature bar fill the screen. After answering a few preference questions, the computer runs its start up operations. From start to finish – including updates – the HP Envy took approximately 10 minutes to finalize its start up. After that was completed, I noticed one thing right off the bat – the temperature of the computer. I used a Infrared Thermometer to take the surface temperature of the laptop in a few different places. I got readings between 104 and 107 degrees Fahrenheit. I also used an infrared camera (FLIR One) to take a few shots of the heat signature from the top and bottom of the computer. After taking those readings, I did notice that the heat dissipated quickly. After the initial set-up, I began doing my testing. BASIC COMPUTING SKILLS One of the main things I use computers (and laptops) for is to type. I do a lot of writing and therefore, how responsive a keyboard is to me and how it feels is very important to my overall experience with a laptop. I enjoy the fact that the screen is touch sensitive. That makes it easy to transition between tablet, phone, and computer. I can't tell you how many times I have gone to touch a screen on a laptop to only be disappointed that the screen isn't a touchscreen. Given that comfortable typing is a big feature for me, I usually complete an online typing test to see what my speed is like. I then compare that to my speed on my MacBook Pro. In this instance, typing on the HP Envy was much more efficient than it was on my MBP. I had a speed of 70WPM on the Envy and on the MBP, it was 65WPM. The keyboard is quite responsive and the keys have a softer feel to them. It's very quiet to type on the Envy and the spacing of the keys is comfortable. CPU/GPU PERFORMANCE The HP Envy has been running very smoothly. It's been very responsive and able to handle the tasks I've thrown at it. Given that this computer is mainly built for gaming and application performance, those are the main areas that I was testing when I was using the laptop. To measure the performance of the GPU and CPU, I used two benchmarking tools – Geekbench 4 and NovaBench. Geekbench 4 Results The HP Envy 360x ended up with a single-core score of 2264 and a multi-core score of 6698. It also returned an OpenCL score of 31731. According to other Geekbench 4 results, the top scoring machine with an AMD Ryzen 5 processor is 4782/17291. In this regard, the HP Envy is performing below the top performing machine. The OpenCL test looks specifically at how well the GPU performs. The HP Envy has an AMD Radeon Vega 8 integrated graphics chipset with shared video memory. It's designed to provide solid image quality for Internet usage, movies, basic photo editing, and casual gaming. Looking at other AMD Radeon Vega 8 GPUs that have been tested on Geekbench, the average score is 33515. With that in mind, the HP Envy's GPU is performing a bit below the average. NovaBench Results NovaBench does a similar type of testing on your system but provides you with a different set of scores and analysis. The overall score of the HP Envy was 1090 and had a CPU score of 638 and GPU score of 203. I can’t say which test works better — they are just different. BATTERY PERFORMANCE According to the specs from HP, this laptop should work up to 10 hours (depending on the display panel that is installed). During my testing of this laptop, I tried to make note of how long the battery was lasting depending on the task being run at the time. When I first pulled the laptop out of its box, I placed it on charge for a big and then unplugged it as I started working with it. Starting with 81% battery, I noted that after about 3 hours, the battery had drained by 71%. At 10%, the computer gives you a warning about a low battery, so I plugged it into AC power at that point. During those 3 hours, I was running the tests I mentioned above and getting the computer set-up. I also began running Windows system updates. With this timing in mind, I think I can estimate an approximate battery life that will last a little over 4 hours if it's being vigorously used like I was doing. HARD DRIVE SPEED Finally, I wanted to test the hard drive's speed. This model of the HP Envy comes with 128GB PCIe SSD. According to the stress test I used (32GB), the top read/write speed of this SSD is 513/282 MB/s. This was a little disappointing considering that I did a test on a Razer Blade Stealth a few months ago and its read/write speeds with a 16GB stress test was 3153/1113 MB/s. It, too, had a PCI-e SSD. ENTERTAINMENT EXPERIENCE The last two features I looked at with the HP Envy had to deal with how well the computer handled entertainment like streaming video and gaming. Using Netflix, I watched the introduction to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. The movie opens with a vibrant color pallette, extrodinary special effects mixed with human actors, and an eclectic music soundtrack. This combination of elements makes it an awesome test for both the display and speaker set for the HP Envy. I was very impressed by how good the picture looked on the screen. It was immaculate. The audio was well-amplified and easy to understand so I would rate the speakers at 'above average' for a laptop. In addition to the video trial, I also downloaded and played a few rounds of Sonic Dash. The game graphics held up very well and gameplay was smooth. Since this game is very fast-paced, I would expect that the HP Envy would hold up well with other types of gameplay, too. CONCLUSION The HP Envy is a wonderful multi-purpose laptop. It's above average for a standard performance laptop, but not up to par with 'gaming' laptops or custom builds. I would recommend this for users who are looking for one machine to accomplish many different tasks.

2 in one laptop. Works awesome for school and work assignments. Glad I bought it :)