lwildernorva

This thread has come along at a time when I've also been looking at replacing my four-year-old travel machine. I was in my local BJs Warehouse today and ran across this: https://www.bjs.com/product/hp-probo...00000001531777. My research shows that Amazon offered it for the same price as one of its Deals of the Day during the Black Friday rush. The keyboard will work for me--I tried it with the included Word software. I'm also not too concerned about the size of the SSD drive as the current machine is an ASUS with a 32GB drive so I've gotten used to working with the bare minimum. The weight is maybe 3/4 of a pound more than I would like, and I wish it had a better processor, but the dual-core fits the $289 price tag. Prime uses would be word processing, email, and some minor video watching. 90-day return policy would give me a legitimate opportunity to see if it would work for me, including on a couple of airline flights scheduled before the middle of April.

Thoughts about this machine?

STVA

The screen resolution sucks in my opinion. I know it is only a 11.6" screen, but I'd recommend 1080p (1920×1080.)

der_saeufer

Everything about that machine is low-end, but c'mon, it's less than $300. 1080p would be nice, but 1366x768 is all you're gonna get for a beater laptop anywhere near that price point, and on a screen that small it's not terrible. The 128GB SSD is a nice plus in a segment where 32GB eMMC is the standard. The one big drawback is that that's really heavy for an 11" laptop. My $150 Chromebook is nearly a full pound lighter, and it's a 'rugged' model intended for schoolkids.

If you want to run Windows and have time to shop, I'd see what you can find in Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc's outlet stores and/or pick up two years ago's ultrabook secondhand. If you're looking for something you can easily just walk in and pick off a shelf, though, you can do a whole lot worse than that one if the weight doesn't bother you.

lwildernorva

That's why the 90-day return policy is attractive to me. I can use it for a couple of months, including taking a couple of trips, to see if the weight bothers me. I have a work laptop, which despite having a 15" screen is about as heavy as this HP, but IT policy prevents me from taking it on international trips so I'm really using the laptop to allow me to work on writing I do in my job, review emails (although we have an in-house network, work emails can also be accessed through an Outlook app on our public website), and otherwise serve as an Internet device when I'm on the ground or on a flight with wifi access and a video viewer when I'm on a plane without wifi access.

bss308

wco81

Yeah it really depends on what you want to do while traveling.

DVD playback is fine but do you want to pack discs? Or do you want to spend time to rip the videos onto the hard disk so you don't have to worry about packing an optical drive and DVD discs/cases>?

If you're not planning to do heavy work, like something that requires a lot of typing or using the mouse (to say edit photos for instance), then you can consider an iPad or a tablet, use it for browsing, load it up with movies or use one of the many streaming apps.

I recently got an HP Spectre X360, with 15 inch 4K screen. It was on sale Black Thursday. The 13-inch model, which is like 3 pounds or even less, wasn't on sale so would have cost a couple of hundred more. So I got the bigger laptop, to save the money and figure the bigger screen would be better for movies.

But I also have an iPad Pro which I load up with movies for travel. I packed both on a recent trip, because I wanted to back up my RAW files to both the internal SSD of the HP laptop as well as to an external drive.

I used both the iPad and the laptop for streaming. While I prefer the larger screen of the laptop, I found that on some streaming services, which I accessed via VPN running on my router back home (as opposed to a commercial VPN service), the streams looked better on the iPad than the laptop. It seemed like some services like Showtime Anytime, Xfinity Stream and FX served up higher bitrate streams to iPad apps. than to the laptop accessing these same services through the Chrome browser running on Windows 10.

joejones

Personally, I think HP is terrible quality and wouldn't buy it at any price. I bought a HP 2-in-1 convertible tablet about 3 years ago and the plastic case developed a serious crack around the power port after about a year. Eventually I couldn't charge it because the cable wouldn't make contact unless I physically held it in the port. Had to consign that one to a dumpster. Now I have an EliteBook at work, and it is slow and heavy -- I don't bother traveling with it because my <$1k personal machine is faster and lighter, and I can do all my work over cloud apps or VPN. Maybe some of the higher-end HP stuff is better but I'd avoid their low end.

DYKWIA

I bought an Acer Chromebook CB5-312T-K1TR at the weekend from E-Bay.

Very impressed so far. Great screen, and I've loaded the Microsoft Android apps so it's effectively a decent desktop. The only disappointment is the touchpad - it feels nice and clicky in some parts, but like it's crushing grit in others. I've been using a mouse, so that gets around that.

I installed Teamviewer to remote into my iMac - so I can do development work (if I really want to)

It's silent, and very responsive. Takes a few seconds to boot, and is as about as secure as you can make a PC these days.

GadgetFreak

I've had a few Chromebooks over the years. The latest is a Pixelbook and it is a big step forward because of the Android apps, especially office as you point out. I have an Office 365 subscription from work and combined with the Android apps it makes a big difference. It has a more or less all day battery and a very good keyboard, at least to me. The screen is also quite good and it's fairly light and thin. We use Google Docs a lot plus it has 256 gb of storage so I can put stuff on the local drive if I want or need to as well.

javabytes

Dell XPS 13 or 15 are the best all-around travel notebooks today if you're after a PC, between performance, form factor, and build quality. (Yes, 15" might be considered too big for a travel laptop by some, but it's still thin and light.) Lenovo Thinkpads like the X1 Carbon can be rock solid companions for road warriors also, but tend to lack style and screen quality compared to the Dells.

I personally would not go with a Chromebook; it's still a fledgling OS and I'd rather know my laptop can run pretty much anything I want it to.

But without knowing your budget or intended uses while you're traveling, it's hard to be more specific with a recommendation.

lwildernorva

I picked up the HP mentioned earlier in this thread. Boy, for a small computer, too much of a beast. The development team for this laptop apparently worked on the East German Trabant. It's a shame because the computer has some plusses: I like the keyboard, the footprint certainly is small enough to fit a tray table even in economy, and the performance of the computer as a whole is much better than my previous travel laptop--not a surprise since I've used the old machine for four years. But the downsides are serious, and it's not just the weight but the thickness and shape of the laptop. The battery has a curve, a flange to the bottom of it which I guess improves air circulation underneath but increases the thickness of the laptop. And at nearly four pounds, this very small laptop seems even heavier.

It'll probably go back to BJs, but it certainly isn't going on any trips because it's just too heavy and cumbersome.

chx1975

1. The most travel sized laptop is the One Netbook Mix Yoga 2S . That thing is ... I am at a loss of words. Want a 7" tablet? Got one! Want almost equivalent hardware to the current Macbook Air? Got one! I love mine. How long did we wait for a non Atom laptop in this size? I had my employer buy me a Vaio P in 2010, at least that's how long. Of course, you don't write a novel on a 7" keyboard but otherwise it's quite great.
2. If you want something larger and a Chromebook is up your alley, why not the ThinkPad X220 w/ Cloudready instead?

DYKWIA

You can't install Play Store on Cloudready, so no Android apps. That would make it a non-starter for me.

MaxBuck

As someone with three Surface Pros to my name, I don't know why they're not the "travel laptop" of choice for everybody. Fast, light, great display, reasonably priced.

chx1975

Keyboard...? If I haul a 12" laptop around that'd better have the ThinkPad keyboard. (My current loadout is the One Mix Yoga 2S and the Lenovo ThinkPad 25.)