HP - 15.6" Touch-Screen Laptop - AMD A10-Series - 6GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive - Black

Full disclosure – I received this laptop in return for a fair and honest review. I am also a member of AMD’s Red Team plus. All opinions are my own. This budget laptop features an AMD A10-9600p processor in a polycarbonate shell with a 15.6” 1366 x 768 touch screen running Windows 10. Also included are 6GB of 2133 DDR4 ram, and a 1TB 5400 rpm HDD, at an obtainable $399 price point. The A10-9600p is a new APU from AMD’s Bristol Ridge Family of processors. It has a base clock of 2.4 GHz, can turbo up to 3.3 GHz, supports DDR4 memory, and has 4 CPU cores with 6 GPU cores. All this in a 15w package that is quite good at multitasking. The laptop body is made of plastic with a matte black finish that is broken up by ribs on the lid, and a grooved palm rest. A ¾” bezel surrounds the glossy touch screen that has quite good viewing angles. Color shift is nearly nonexistent except at extreme angles, which is amazing for a laptop in this segment. Color saturation and contrast are great which makes watching videos awesome. The left side is home to the power jack, exhaust vent, Ethernet jack, HDMI, 2 USB ports – one each 3.0 and 2.0, and the headphone jack. The right side is where you will find a Kensington lock slot, DVD RW optical drive, another USB 2.0 port for a total of 3, memory card reader, and indicator lights for power and hard drive activity. All this wrapped in a package that is less than an inch thick, and under 5 lbs. The keyboard has island style keys whose travel is pretty shallow, but doesn’t have much flex to it as its part of the case. The track pad too is built into the case, and does a good job of recognizing taps and swipes. I like that it has physical buttons for left and right clicking. They do require a firm press, so no worries about accidental clicks. So how does it work? I was pleasantly surprised how quickly it booted up to the desktop – only took about 45 seconds to get to the desktop including me typing my password. That’s pretty impressive given the slow 5400 rpm spindle speed of the hard drive, but that 1TB will come in handy for storing all your pictures and videos. Video playback whether from local content, streaming, or from the DVD drive is smooth and stutter free. Internet browsing with multiple tabs open is handled with ease thanks to the 6GB of memory onboard. And productivity tasks like document creation are a snap too. This is the first laptop I have owned with a touch screen, and found it to be responsive, and rarely failed to respond to input. Whether or not it is useful will likely be a personal decision, as I found myself naturally reaching for the track pad first. So far so good, but as in any laptop designed to a $400 price point; some compromises are to be expected. The plastic does seem to be pretty sturdy, but does not impart a premium feel, and will show smudges and fingerprints readily. And the unrelieved black everything doesn’t impress. There is no Bluetooth, and the wireless card is of the bgn variety. In this segment, the 1366 x 768 resolution is to be expected - no 1080p here. It will play casual games just fine, and older games can be played with lowered settings, but AAA titles are mostly out of reach. Part of the problem is HP has limited the APU to only 384 MB of vram, and this is non adjustable in the bios. This is an issue since some games won’t even launch if there isn’t at least 512 MB available. Also the fan does spool up often, and is quite noticeable. But the biggest demerit is the battery life. HP decided to go with a 3 cell 31Wh lithium ion battery, and it's just way too small. The longest running time I achieved was 3 hrs, and that was just web browsing. I saw as little as 2 hrs of heavy video/gaming use. That’s a shame. The AMD A10 processor is only a 15w part, and with a proper battery, should run all day long for normal day to day tasks. So you are going to find yourself looking for an outlet fairly often in between classes if you intend to take it to school. At the end of the day, this is a budget/entry level laptop, and needs to be viewed from that perspective. The HP 15-ba079dx offers a great screen, plenty of USB and connectivity ports, sturdy build in a relatively thin and light chassis, and has the power to handle all your day to day tasks. Just keep that charger handy.

*AMD provided me with this laptop for my honest and unbiased review Battery Life Battery charge time from dead to 100% 1hr:42m:26s Battery lasted while watching Videos on Hard Drive 2hr:41m:33s Battery lasted while on internet 2hr:39m:09s HDD Speed 92MB/s Read – 92MB/s Write Screen The screen is nice and clear, even after some time with using only the touch screen. The fingerprints were not so seen that I couldn’t watch a video at the end of the day. I have always wanted a touch screen laptop but felt that I would grow bored with it after a few hours however I have not at this time. It’s a pretty sweet feature especially since it’s on Window 10, I used it more than the mouse. The screen resolution is 720p, I would have liked to have seen 1080p but this is just me being picky, for the price and size of the screen it is just fine. Portability It was nice to have in the car to watch some videos on a small road trip to the Zoo and to do some photo editing on the way home so they were ready to upload to share with family and friends. I do know that I need to get a laptop bag of sorts for travel as I was a little too cautious with it; not that it’s fragile but it is a laptop so anything can happen and I can be clumsy at times. Camera I didn’t see anything that stood out as awesome or that I disliked, it wasn’t the highest of quality but it was good for video chats. Wi-Fi Works as good as any other laptop Wi-Fi out there, I had no issues with connectivity or speed. Optical Drive I had to beg someone to lend me a blank DVD and CD to check out the speeds, seems to be the standard speeds for burning media needed. Although I have personally use USB Drives for better convenience. Audio The speakers could get quite loud, which was awesome, Design I like the all black look with grooves on the inner and outer casing. It does leave fingerprints but almost everything does these day. Gaming This was not meant to play games however it can at low to medium settings on some games but you should not buy if you want a gaming laptop, look for the FX series or laptops that state gaming. Pros & Cons The cons are just me being picky, we all have different view on what counts as a pro or con. 8GB of ram would have been more normal for today but 6GB is just fine, especially with it being at DDR4-2133Mhz. I would put it not having 8GB as a con but 6GB is plenty for this laptop since it’s not a gaming laptop. I don’t like the locked bios but I’m a gamer and builder and like messing with things in there when needed but for the average user though this would not be a con. Pros: • Touch Screen • Price $399 • 1TB Space • Design • Not a lot of stickers • Portability • SD Card Reader • HDMI Output Cons: • Locked Bios! Price The price is $399 right now but I have just seen it on sale for $299-$349.99! Which is even more epic if you wanted to pick it up. Rating I have given this 5 stars because it is worth the price for what it can do!

This is a good laptop if you are looking for something entry level at a good price. The specs are actually quite good for this price point with 6 GB RAM, a high-end AMD APU processor, 1 TB hard drive and even a touch screen. Build Quality - this laptop has an entirely plastic exterior construction but has a solid rigid feel to it with no significant flexing, not even of the screen. Portability - the size of this laptop is what I expected from a 15.6" model. At under 5 lbs and less than an inch thick it doesn't feel bulky. Its well suited for school, work, travel and general around-the-house use. In fact, I recently took it on vacation where my wife and I shared use of the laptop for web surfing, Facebook, Google hangouts and video chats with family. Performance - there are 3 main things that affect performance in a laptop: processor, memory and disk. I'll cover each of these individually. (1) Processor - this laptop contains one of AMD's fastest and newest APUs the A10-9600P. An APU differs from a traditional CPU in that it also includes graphics (GPU) built into the APU. This particular APU offers a 4-core CPU and 6-core GPU. If you aren't interested in the tech I'll just say that it has plenty of power to do all the things you would do on a laptop from web surfing to productivity like Office and even a bit of casual gaming (more on that later). (2) Memory - this laptop contains 6 GB of DDR4 RAM which is a decent amount for a laptop at this price point. Many low priced laptops have only 4 GB RAM which really is just barely enough. The extra 2 GB of RAM on this one gives Windows a bit of breathing room to not cause performance to suffer. As I write this review with Chrome and a few other Windows apps open I'm using 59% of the total memory available. (3) Disk - this laptop contains a huge 1 TB HDD (hard disk drive). If you are looking for a lot of storage space this laptop has what you need. This drive is a traditional mechanical hard disk drive and not the newer faster but more expensive SSD (solid state drive) which I wouldn't expect to see in a laptop at this price point. I mention this to avoid any confusion about what type of drive is included. The performance of this HDD feels typical of a laptop disk drive. Display/Screen - I was pleasantly surprised by the screen in this laptop. It's bright, crisp, clear AND a touch screen! The touch screen is a really nice addition especially in a laptop at this price point. Touch screen and Windows 10 makes a great combo since Windows 10 supports many touch screen gestures. I mostly use touch to scroll, zoom in/out and for screen taps. For some tasks I find using the touch screen feels more nature while for others the traditional keyboard and touchpad seems a better fit. I guess its a matter of personal preference. Battery Life - this is one area where I expected more. I tested a few times from full charge and averaged around 3 hours (sometimes more, sometimes less) doing casual web surfing, editing documents and watching videos. I'm not really sure how that compares to other laptops in this price range but I came away feeling battery life could be better. Gaming - this laptop isn't really marketed as a gaming laptop but for completeness I thought I'd touch on that topic. As I mentioned this laptop is equiped with AMD's A10-9600P APU with built-in GPU which is designed for casual gaming. Overall for a low cost laptop it does fairly well. For example it can play Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rocket League fairly well but more graphically demanding titles like the new Doom are are more of a challenge. Anyone serious about gaming will have a gaming desktop PC but its good to know that this laptop is capable of casual gaming which can't be said for all laptops. Ports/Connectivity - This laptop includes all the typical ports to connect your devices including 1 USB 3.0 (great for fast devices like USB thumb drives and external hard drives), 2 USB 2.0, 1 HDMI video output, 1 RJ-45 (wired network), 1 headphone/microphone combo and SD card slot. Overall I've been pleased with this laptop. It has sturdy construction, doesn't feel cheap, surprisingly nice touch screen and good performance. At this low price point its a great value. You get a lot of laptop for not a lot of money. My only complaint is battery life which I wished was a bit better but I didn't feel it was enough of a concern to deduct a star from my rating. I would have rated it 4.5 if I could but half stars aren't allowed. Please note that I received this laptop in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Pros – Affordable, DDR4 Ram, Strong AMD APU, Nice touch screen operation, fairly light. Can handle older games ok. Cons – Poor modern title gaming thanks to company configuration, small battery, cheap material feels, glossy screen for outside work. Final Thoughts – Recommended for price range, especially when on sale. Just don’t expect to do any heavy gaming because of hardware configuration. It’s a shame, too, since it has built-in potential to be a knockout buy. Full Review Laptops have certainly advanced over the years. However, I am a power PC user. I like a tower packed full of the fastest components and a screen the size of a wall if I can get it. But ultimately, this is not the most practical solution when you are on the go or…writing a review in the backyard as I am now. Sure, I could have done this on my mobile phone; it is almost as powerful these days. Nevertheless, there is still a certain amount of convenience in a laptop that is not yet available in a mobile device. Today I’m using HP’s Model 15-BA079DX laptop to write this. It was kindly provided by AMD and Best Buy. It is powered by AMD’s newer A10-9600P processor. It comes packed with 4 cores of 2.4Ghz power accompanied by 6 more compute cores from the built-in Radeon R5 graphics. HP has included 6Gb of Samsung 2133 Mhz DDR4 ram in this particular unit (Product W2M88UA#Aba) It’s equipped with standard ports including a USB 3.0 port, two USB 2.0 ports, a 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack, an HDMI output port, and an RJ45 LAN port. There is a card reader on the right side, along with a SuperMulti DVD/CD burner. For connectivity, it features Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi 802.11b/g/n, and 10/100Mbps Ethernet. It also has built-in HD webcam. Its thickness is around 0.9-inch and it weighs roughly 4.75 lbs with a 3-cell Li-ion battery attached. I’m finding an average runtime of 1:45min to 2:15 hrs depending on tasks performed. You’ll be cutting it close on a 2.5 hr movie but it was doable off full charge. DDR4 is a long-awaited upgrade for AMD fans: a processor that can run DDR4 ram. [Is this previous sentence redundant???] It is the latest, fastest, consumer version of computer ram on the market. This is kind of a big deal to those who know the inner workings of a computer. To those who don’t, it means faster computing and lower power requirements to do so. Essentially, it offers better efficiency all around, despite its small size. The HP15, as I’ll call it, is a new budget-oriented device. It’s not a screaming fast-gaming laptop that you’ll have to plug in in 30 minutes, nor is it a stripped-down basic screen and keyboard. Boasting the aforementioned AMD APU and the newest format of ram, this laptop actually packs some punch. Web surfing is a breeze and quick; it has no extraneous page load times. Multi-tab browsing, even with Microsoft Edge, is effortless. Yes, that means this unit comes preloaded with Windows 10 64 Bit Home edition. It also is minimalist on bloatware. Uninstalling these [these what? Need a noun here—you’re too far away from the thing you were referencing earlier.] is easy enough and makes the laptop a little faster, since it has less to load up and run. I personally removed everything except the HP assistant (which I disabled) and the Cyberlink Video software for the occasional DVD playback. Speaking of DVD’s, the screen on the HP15 is a multi-touch display sized at 15.6-inch with HD 1366 x 768 pixel resolution. The picture is clear and clean. But the biggest benefit is the tough screen capabilities. As I type along and make a mistake, I love the convenience of just pressing the highlighted word, and the correct spelling pops up. I then press on the correction and I’m done. There’s no messing with the trackpad and it alleviates the need for a mouse when writing. The screen responds to a soft, rather than hard, touch. The caveat to this is the screen is glossy and makes working out in daylight difficult, as it just can’t seem to get bright enough to combat the daylight. The trackpad has a textured surface of injection plastic, as does the rest of the unit. It’s relatively responsive. In other words, it works, but I can’t comment much further, as I hate trackpads in general and will always default to plugging a mouse into any type of device that allows it. The left/right click buttons carry a solid feel and satisfying click. The keyboard is the standard chicklet style. It offers not much key stroke travel. [Is this what you mean???] However, it’s laid out well enough for easy typing, even with my big hands. You also get a dedicated 10 Key setup allowing for easy number entry. The unit comes with the usual fn key features for controlling your audio, media playback, and even a dedicated “Airplane mode” key. The shell of the laptop is injection molded plastic, but it is not very thick. For example, if you lift it one-handed from a corner of the unit, you can almost feel it flex under its own weight. I don’t think it is anything serious; however, although there is no separation of parts, it is definitely engineered to minimum tolerances. The top of the shell has a ribbed design texture to aid in grip when carrying. The rest is a smooth micro texture. While not necessarily a fingerprint magnet, it does seem to create a lot of darker colored area wherever your hands make contact, due to the transfer of your natural oils. It does clean up easily, though a quality soft cloth is advised for lint capture as opposed to paper products. I mentioned productivity is a breeze. Facebook gaming, then, is no issue. On the flip side, AAA gaming is out. The HP-15 is not designed for it—period. So how about MOBA’s ? You might be able to turn all the options down and get some playability. I personally don’t play any MOBAs, so I have no results. I’m offering a calculated guess based on the specs here presented. Quick DDR4: check. Strong AMD APU: check. Good AMD R5 Graphics: check. However, HP has decided, for whatever reason, to limit the available ram to the GPU to only 384mb. Most modern titles need at least 512mb to even fire up. Quick tinkering with the bios doesn’t allow this to be changed either. What a shame. If you could upgrade to 16GB of ram and if you could feed the gPU up to 1GB of shared ram, you could have a beastly, super economical portable. Overall, if you’re looking for a sub-$350 all around laptop that is quiet with some neat features, this isn’t a bad a deal. It’s nothing stellar, but when the price occasionally drops below $299, it’s seriously worth considering. I’ve really been enjoying the touch screen for editing on the fly and can see me using this laptop a fair bit more than I thought I would.

Note: I received this laptop in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. The HP 15-BA079DX is a killer laptop for newer gamers who are looking to get into PC gaming without breaking the bank. The laptop plays DotA 2, CS:GO, and Rocket League incredibly well at default settings and can even squeeze out medium/high quality while still being very playable. Also being a laptop, it has the convenience of being a very portable system so bringing your "rig" to LANs, conventions, or even a friend's house is a no-brainer (with no carrying bulky equipment as with desktops). Beyond gaming it has some pretty cool features. A 15.6" touch-screen display on a sub-$400 laptop is hard to find nowadays, especially one with a newer processor and superb video capabilities. The 1TB HDD (HGST) is actually pretty fast and there's plenty of space to add programs, games, pictures, videos, etc. The built-in speakers sound incredibly good, great highs and mid-ranges, and as such they're not tinny in the slightest. More importantly, they get LOUD, so if you want to listen to some music while vacuuming the room or doing work in a hallway, you'll still be able to hear it. The keyboard also sports full-size keys and a number pad, so it's great for productivity. Getting back to being gaming related, the keys aren't squishy and are quite responsive, I'm able to game for hours straight on the laptop without feeling fatigued or uncomfortable. Now it does come with a battery included but it's only a 3-cell, so you're looking at about three hours of juice using HP's recommended power settings. If you're looking to make the system an ultra-portable one, I highly recommend picking up a 6-cell battery which should double your time away from the plug and be plenty of power for cross country flights. Although, for the most part, the laptop feels designed to be a desktop replacement so it's not a major detraction. If you or a young one are looking to make the jump from console to PC without building a $1,000+ rig, you'd be hard pressed to find anything better for the price. I highly recommend the HP 15-BA079DX for its price, performance, and great build quality.

I have to be honest this would be a 5 star laptop if you NEVER need or UPGRADE the hard drive. I repair laptops & this is the 1st one I actually bought new. Also the first time I considered an HP given most that come in my shop are just a few days out of warranty with a bad hard drive. Sure it's a huge 1TB, but it's a 5400rpm HGST Travelstar piece of junk. That's what is in 99% of HP's is one of those drives. However, HP had me sold on the idea of 6 GB of DDR4 @ 1866mhz, along with the R5 graphics & The newest AMD A-10 9600P 2.4 Quad core APU. With an HDMI out, it can be a decent little gamer, which leads to the hard drive. This laptop is held back a lot due to the super slow stock hard drive & I knew this buying it. I bought a PNY 240GB while I was there to fix it. First I booted it up & went through the motions of "setup", that took an hour to finish completely. Updates, registration, & such. I then removed the stock hard drive & did a "clean install" of Windows 10 x64 Home from a Microsoft flash without a glitch except for the fact that the touch screen has no function. Reason? No driver & not recognized by Windows, period. Support tried but didn't seem knowledgeable enough on this subject as I have run into similar before with HP laptops. This time I'm striking out with finding a driver so far to make touch work again. HP Support claims she will upgrade this issue. I was told to put the original drive in to have touch work. No way. The CPU is as good as a 6th gen i5 & with ddr4, it needs an SSD or a 7200rpm REAL hard drive to get out of it's way. Does it work stock? Yepper's & it's a great value to all who don't care about wasting all the power under the hood. Do not drop this even lightly with a stock drive! It's mounted in the front, left, bottom as viewed from the upright position, with zero shock protection. Not on piece of rubber, not that it matters much on a mechanical drive, nor should one drop their laptop. What makes it a 5 star is the price for the latest AMD has to offer, with DDR4, not like some say it's DDR3L. I had mine open. With the stock HDD you have 1TB which is plenty for most. One quoted "this is a laptop for the masses", & he is right. For the price, grab it while you can. It went up $100 since May's release. Spend the extra & grab the PNY 240GB there at Best Buy too & make it a "race car" for under $400 if you can install it yourself like me. Just "clone" the drive & the touch will work as normal. I wanted a "clean install" is all. Some rate the graphics as poor. Ahem, no. The lower end LED at 1366 x 768 gives an adequate picture but that's not how to get the most. Use the HDMI port & put it up on the "big screen". The AMD R5 graphics can do 1080p with no issues on my 32". Audio as well is run right through the AMD chipset. No frills notebook, lightweight, fast, well built (aside from the hdd part), very impressed overall out of box. Stock speakers are not bad, the unit is impressively strong but flexible plastic type material, very durable I would say. Keyboard is great, solid, full sized with a number pad. I gave it an honest 2 stars due to honest issues unresolved & repeated by HP on a few other occasions. HP personnel had a part in this 2 star. On a notebook that doesn't "flip" or come in 2, touch is kinda dumb anyway? Better off putting that into an HD screen with no touch, next time HP. A few cons are key features in most laptops. Missing is Bluetooth, 10/100 Ethernet (really, no 1000), has an IR radio that isn't told about, so you can receive files from any IR source unless you change some settings or turn it off. It would be ok if there was security of some kind on the IR but it seems open to anything in range. Only 3 USB ports but all are USB 3.0. A single SD slot & a headphone jack is all for connections. Pros are mentioned, I like having an HDMI port & hardware close to what a desktop would run as far as power & speed go. A DVD burner is a cool thing these days as well as that nice keyboard. See what that touch screen caused? Lmao! For under $400, running Windows 10, 1TB HDD, 6GB DDR4 RAM, it's a great buy if you just want to use it as is. Has the internals found in $500 up laptops. In fact, the CPU alone costs nearly what the whole laptop cost me. 5 star "stock" buy, 3 in reality for missing the major basic things laptops have. This is a REAL review people. With this unit you get a working laptop, entry sorta level features, webcam, bloatware to delete, good WIFI chip, DVD burner, loads of space, plenty of memory, Windows 10 Home x64, & it's probably fast enough for most as it is. First times using it out of the box it was good but the stock HDD was just holding this new, faster AMD APU & DDR4 RAM back, actually making it feel slow to get going. SSD in now, no touch but everything else works fine & the speed is quite blinding. It plows through installs like my 8 core desktop. Using the WIFI, it easily downloads up to my 75mb/s FIOS in the "status". It never peaked the 100 portion of the Ethernet, so that is a non issue. The SSD cost about $70 for a 240GB PNY CS1311, more room than I use per day. Stock or modified, it's a STEAL just for the APU & having a DDR4 board to start with. It's a laptop you can buy & still get what you paid for it 2 years later if you take care of it. This is day 2 of ownership, year 20 of experience with PC's & laptops.

I bought and set this laptop up for a friend who's heading back to school. I put it through the various tests and it's light years ahead of mine which is 1.5 generations behind. The first thing I want to address is the battery life, as I see there have been people who've been having issues with it. The power profile in the system setting are unfortunately set by default so that the speed of the processor is unrestrained at 100% (up to 3.3GHz) while running under Batteries --- and this is true for both the Balanced (HP Recommended profile) as well as Power Saver (this definitely seems like a software misconfiguration to me). In other words, the power usage of the processor is unrestricted, and with any prolonged load, the processor will run at its power limit of 15W (or even higher in short bursts). Fixing this by disabling turbo clock rates and keeping limiting CPU to a max of 2GHz and under gives a battery life of 4hrs while under full use. A more aggressive profile and a Windows10 option I discovered this later likely will raise this to 5+ hours of in-use battery life. Idle is very efficient especially if you set screen to black out after 5 min or so. The battery life with high idle time would likely well exceed the above. I'll go into the procedure of how to limit the unplugged CPU frequency at the bottom of this review. Other nice features, good ergonomics, I haven't had any of those annoying common touchpad misfires where it changes window focus or scrolls a page back while you type and while the base of your hand hovers over the touchpad. So this is excellent and important. Keyboard has a good feel, better than my Z50. The small up-down cursor keys may take some time getting used to. The case is fairly slim and the 15.6 screen and footprint fit very well and easily in a backpack. This should travel perfectly and has a noticeably smaller footprint than my Z50. The frame is nice and rigid to pick up. The sound quality is excellent for internal laptop speakers. I'm jealous. Nice features exist on this model that are vanishing in others: good old trusty ethernet and a DVD drive (great for movies, archiving, sharing files, and which I assume can also be converted to a SSD bay) . Linux compatibility: I also briefly tested the laptop for linux compatibility using Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon. The system booted and ran the OS without any observable flaws under a cursory examination. Using cpufreq-info the available non-turbo frequency rates ranged from 1.2 to 2.4GHz, with available frequencies (in GHz) being 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.4 . Turbo rates were observed to commonly be in the 2.6 to 2.9 range, using the cpufreq-aperf command which samples rates every second. Clocks would also hit 3.0 on rare occasion; once I think i observed 3.1. I believe the top boost rates of 3.2-3.3 are achieved only in very short bursts; I didn't observe them with the coarse 1 second sampling of cpufreq-aperf. End-of-Review Procedure to fix the Power Saver profile and HP Recommended (Balanced) Power profile to fix any battery life issues: Start Menu -> Power&Sleep, then at bottom of screen "Related Settings" find and click "Additional Power Settings" This opens "Power Options" Dialog, in bottom of it, click "Change advanced power settings" Then click "Change Settings" for the various profiles you will commonly use. Certainly this will be the Balanced profile ("HP Recommended"), and optionally in addition the "Power Saver" profile. In the Change Settings popup dialog scroll down and select "Processor Power management" In Balanced plan, I choose a Max frequency of 84% for "On Battery" state, and 100% while "Plugged in". You can choose something higher as long as it's not 100%, which allows turbo frequencies to be enabled, which is a bad thing while running under batteries. In Power Saver Profile I set the Processor max frequency limit to 70% on batteries and 99% plugged in; this is a more aggressive energy saving profile that is optional. I tested the Balanced power profile for an hour, and an extrapolated battery life of 4 hours seemed to be the case. This was with a good amount of activity (www, installing apps, etc) and screen set to just under 1/3 brightness which is a comfortable setting for indoors. I later discovered Windows 10 has further power savings features. It allows frivolous tasks to be suspended while battery is under a certain charge. To access this: Start -> Settings -> Battery Saver This pops up an interesting dialog one can experiment with.

I just got this laptop this morning after doing much research on the new 7th gen APUs this has in it. there was not much accept for release notes and such and not anything on the gaming capability of this APU. As an IT tech i have always hated integrated parts in laptops due to their low performance. But since i have liked AMD's Desktop Graphics cards for my PC gaming i settled for this instead of a $1000 gaming laptop since i have a Gaming server and Desktop at home. I was Blown away when i took a chance and installed a few games - The elder scrolls: Skyrim legendary and Fallout New Vegas. For the $400 price tag i was thinking well this is a waste of time but i will try anyway and fallout on High specs i was getting an average of 40 FPS and Skyrim on Medium i was getting from 30-45 outside and inside maps up to 55 peaks. Now i know this is no where near my 60+ on my desktop but for a $400 laptop i find this acceptable. On the non-gaming side of this review i found that this laptop is snappy it was quick, transferred fast from the USB 3.0 port from my USB 3.0 external HHD, 18GBs of mixed media in under 4mins. the 6GB DDR4 makes this speed feel like i am on my desktop that has a 3rd gen i5 and 8GB DDR3 gaming ram memory i did find the only issue is with the steam gaming app for those that may get this for low end gaming be prepared for a lag when installing from game backups or backing up(Backup Not tested as no need to backup a game i have a backup for) steam draws almost 80% CPU during Installs from backups locking up web browsing. the audio i found great for it being a realtek chip which they have had issues in the past with low volume outputs on 100% volume. Notes: - i would not try fallout 4 or any new high spec games that need massive graphics cards on this laptop. - I do plan to upgrade to 16GB DDR4 ram memory (Yes the specs say DDR3L but when i went to install the 16GB DDR3L i got with the laptop i pull the back off to find DDR4