The HP Pavilion 17 is definitely not the best laptop with i5 processor and the best laptop, at least not anymore. However, it is a solid option if you can find it at a cheap enough price. Even though the old hardware really doesn’t hold up anymore, it’s still a decently capable laptop. It may not make it to the list of the best laptops, but it works perfectly.
Why We Like It – HP Pavilion 17
Even though the HP Pavilion 17 is pretty old at this point, it might still have some value left. If you can find it used below $500, it would be a great laptop for accepting Zoom calls, online classes, and for working from home.
- Multi-format digital media card reader
- DVD burner/optical drive
- Full-sized keyboard
- Slow 5400 RPM hard drive
- Dated design
- Old inefficient hardware inside
Power & Performance
For starters, the HP Pavilion 17 sports an Intel Core i5-4210U dual-core processor inside. That is a whole six generations old processor at this point and doesn’t even have support for DDR4 RAM. It doesn’t have good performance or efficiency. If you are in the market for a bright laptop then you should go through our HP Pavilion 15 6 Laptop review.
Battery
As expected from this HP laptop, the battery life is pretty terrible. But not just because of efficiency, HP also didn’t include a good battery inside; it’s just a four-cell battery. Even the Dell G5 15 Gaming Laptop has better battery life than it.
Ports & Expandability
If there’s anything even somewhat good about this laptop, it is its abundance of ports. You get two USB 3.0 ports and a USB 2.0 port. All of these are full-sized USB Type-A ports, so there’s no Type-C on this 17-inch laptop. And there’s an ethernet port too, but it’s a 100Mbps port. Check out our HP Pavilion Gaming 15 review for an excellent gaming machine.
Build Quality
The build quality is decent enough, but overall the design is just dated. The huge bezels on the display (that is not even Full HD, only 900p) stick out like a sore thumb. The full-sized keyboard is decent enough, but it’s not a backlit keyboard, even if the product description says so. The trackpad is just garbage (pretty much unusable).
Value
At MSRP, the HP Pavilion 17 is most definitely not worth it. There are much better options available on Amazon.com at the same or lower price (e.g., the Acer Aspire 5 A515). However, if you can find it used at below $500, it can be a good alternative to use as a Zoom machine. And it can also be a good beginner’s laptop for students if found at a cheap price point. But it’ll never be able to compete with modern laptops in terms of performance.
HP Pavilion 17 Wrap Up
The HP Pavilion 17 is not a bad laptop; it’s just badly priced compared to newer laptops. If you really want to buy a laptop at a similar price point, the ASUS VivoBook S14 is miles better than this one.
