A cheap and colourful laptop, but far from cheerful
HP’s Stream 11 stands out from the crowd with its flamboyant bright purple casing. The wrist rest has a subtle polka-dot pattern, which gets lighter from top to bottom. This isn’t as distracting as it sounds and the whole thing is sturdily made.
At just £180, the Stream 11 is incredibly cheap for a Windows 8.1 laptop. Despite its bargain price, it’s light (1.3kg) and its battery survived an impressive 10 and a half hours in our light-usage test. This is a great return for such a low-cost laptop and is due in large part to its energy-efficient Intel Celeron N2840 processor.
While it conserves battery life, the performance of this processor was disappointing. It’s too slow for demanding tasks like editing photos and videos. We could live with that, if it didn’t also struggle with more everyday tasks such as web browsing and office work. When we opened several browser tabs or programs simultaneously the laptop’s responsiveness came to a virtual standstill. While the slow processor is partly to blame, the measly 2GB of memory doesn’t help and just isn’t sufficient for a Windows computer.
Among the extras is a Microsoft Office 365 subscription (free for one year). You’ll probably need to rely on USB or online storage though, because almost half the 32GB SSD is already occupied out of the box. You get 1TB of OneDrive storage free for a year and 25GB of Dropbox storage free for six months.
The keyboard feels a tad spongy, but it’s comfortable to type on, with large keys that provide enough feedback and travel. The touchpad is more flawed. Although spacious, it wasn’t particularly accurate and sometimes struggled to distinguish between a button tap and a movement of the cursor.
The screen looks washed out with poor contrast and tight viewing angles. It’s reasonably bright, but we’ve tested other budget laptops with more vibrant screens. At 11.6in, the screen is relatively small and the 1366x768 resolution can make text hard to read if your eyesight is less than perfect.
The Stream 11 - and other similar computers such as Toshiba’s Satellite CL10 -is an attempt by Microsoft to take on Chromebooks by cramming Windows into the cheapest laptops possible. Unfortunately, the hardware just isn’t up to it. If you want a light laptop for around £200, you should opt for the Asus Chromebook C200. If you want a cheap Windows laptop, then you’ll have to settle for the heavier and slightly more expensive Asus X555L).
VERDICT
You’ll need the patience of a saint when using this slow laptop.
SPECIFICATIONS
2.16GHz Intel Celeron N2840 dual-core processor • 2GB memory • 32GB SSD • Intel Integrated graphics • 11.6in 1366x768-pixel screen • 802.11b/g/n • Windows 8.1 • 1.3kg (1.6kg with charger) • 20x300x206mm (HxWxD) • One-year warranty