A:AnswerNo.
It is recommended to clone the drive if you want to keep all of the data that is already preloaded. You can start with a fresh drive and load whatever version of operating system you desire. If you go the fresh install route, it is highly recommended to download the device drivers, firmware, etc. before either formatting the SSD or installing a new one. Be sure to download the drivers from HPs website for everything aside from CPU and GPU if you are planning to clean install Windows, otherwise, just grep what you need for Linux distros.
A:AnswerEven a $4,000 top of the line workstation won’t be “good enough” for a top comp-si major in four years, so….this might be a good inexpensive intro?
A:AnswerActually you can upgrade to 64 GB, but if you do you need to use a pair of RAM sticks that are a tiny bit slower - as per an above TL;DR question answer.
A:AnswerIt gets warm and it's not noisy at all. Battery life really depends on the how high or low of the demand you're putting on it. I would say 3-4hrs max before energy saver kicks in for extreme demand, but dimming the brightness does help.
A:AnswerWhile I am not familiar with "Display Port Alt Mode", in the laptop's Bestbuy product page, scroll down until you find "Feature", click it and search for "1.4a" for info on the usbc features. You should be able to use the HDMI port as well, possibly giving you a total of 3 screens. Just note that the laptop's screen is 1080p.
A:AnswerIt’s already answered that it’s its own unique 7445HS APU model introduced in Spring 2025. But what’s the difference anyway, and which of the other two is it closest to?
First, all three are similar in that they are part of the Ryzen x 7yyyHS series, which means all three are HS-suffix Zen 4 (Phoenix architecture) laptop parts (since they all start with 7). But the relationship is not as trivial as one might naiively guess. One might guess that 7535HS > 7445HS > 7435HS per the numbers’ cardinal ordering (where > means “is faster than” and/or “is more powerful than.” Wrong! AMD weird numbering aside, the first clue comes from the x part of the full names. We list these with total core counts:
Ryzen 5 7535HS (6 cores); Ryzen 7 7445HS (6 cores total); Ryzen 7 7435HS (8 cores). A Ryzen 5 is in general slower than a same-gen Ryzen 7. Also, 6 cores is generally less powerful than 8 cores. So the latter lists them in increasing order of power per Passmark Multithreaded benchmark (17844, 19015, 23091). If we list their corresponding Passmark Single-threaded Speed benchmarks, we get (3115, 3543, 3136). The (2023 timeframe) 7535 and 7435 have slower threads than the (made in 2025) 7445. This makes sense since the newer chip probably uses a smaller die size, thus faster clock rate so faster instruction rate. In a nutshell, the older 6-core is less powerful than the older 8-core APU, but the newer 6-core 7445 makes up for its low core count by virtue of each thread (still two per core) being 13% faster than the two-years-older Phoenix cores. At the same time, AMD pulls a trick and sticks a Big.Little architecture in the mix (two Big Zen 4 cores plus 4 Little Zen 4c cores). The (remember, same Phoenix architecture) four Little cores use less die space so they can bump clock rate a bit - making 2025 Little Zen 4c cores almost as fast as 2023 Big Zen 4 cores.
In reality, the Ryzen 7 7445HS is philosophically closer to the Ryzen AI 5 340 in which the earlier Big.Little experiment was tried. The latter has three Big Zen 5 cores plus three Little Zen 5c cores (with six total cores in each case). The past wastage of lots of Intel Efficient cores showed AMD how to recycle old Zen 4 Big cores as fast Zen 4c Little cores. Zen 4: the gift that keeps on giving (on Black Friday).
Ryzen 7 7445HS is more powerful than Ryzen 5 7535HS, while at the same time being more (single-threaded speedy than Ryzen 7 7435HS. Both power and speed are important. I’d say the Ryzen 7445HS is the cheapest good-quaity Ryzen laptop APU that I can recommend for a broad swath of applications.
