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2014 HP Pavilion

Ugh. This laptop was absolute balls. If this is considered one my least favorite computers I've owned, then this HP Pavilion laptop is the top contender.

Not counting my mother's Dell Inspiron at the time, this was my first laptop and my first foray into spec woes.

Backstory of my HP Pavilion

I was still upset about losing my MDG Horizon Desktop to a Trojan Horse. 
But what I think what was more painful for me was that I had no personal computer for 3 years. 

And no, my mother's Dell Inspiron laptop at the time doesn't count.

Anyhow, by April 2014, she bought me my HP Pavilion Laptop and I've been playing around with this thing for quite some time.

However, things got a little weird. I've been through a couple moves and no Wi-Fi in our many moves but I rather not discuss about that.

 

What were my specs?

This was the first time I experienced spec woes with Laptops.

The laptop had a Haswell era Intel Pentium Processor. I think it was clocked at 2.5 GHZ but clock speeds often fluctuate.

The ram was nothing to write home about. It had 8GB of DDR3 ram. Higher than in my MDG but not still not impressive for a machine running 64-bit Windows. And to make matters worse, it only had one Ram slot so that means no dual channel.

The hard drive wasn't bad. It was a 750GB Western Digital Hard Disk.

Graphics were not that impressive to begin with. It had an Intel HD Integrated Graphics Chipset.
Still better than the GMA Graphics of the 2000s but still weak when compared to the GTX and Radeon GPUs of the time.
It made many of my 3D Emulators stutter as well as hamper a few 3D Games.
 


Above, these screenshots from some game were kind of the best that this HP Pavilion Laptop could ever accomplish in terms of 3D Game Graphics via Integrated Intel HD Graphics.
(Download these images, enlarge or upscaled them, and you can get a sense of the limitations of integrated graphics.)

On top of that, It came with Windows 8.1 of all things. 
I really wanted a Laptop with Windows 7 at the time but retail copies were so few and OEMS prebuilds didn't come with
them in 2014. I did eventually get the free upgrade to Windows 10 but by then, I really started to wonder whether or not this laptop deserved the upgrade or not.

If you think some of the specs are hot garbage, think again.
Yes they're not impressive but for a fraction of the price for performance between a netbook and a gaming laptop,
it's serviceable. 

To quote Luke Skywalker when he saw the Millennium Falcon: "What a piece of Junk."

To describe my Pavilion Laptop, It's my wonderful piece of junk that works.

 

What did I use my HP Pavilion for?

Despite buying the machine for school related stuff, I barely used it for school due to the lack of Wi-fi in the various basements suites I moved into. Alongside that, I had to use my mother's Dell Inspiron Laptop from 2008 just so I can get the installers for apps I needed.

But I will say, I did have some fun with this thing. I often watched DVDs via Cyberlink Player.

My laptop was preinstalled with Wildtangent so I used that for some of my first forays into proper PC Gaming, not that edutainment crap I was stuck with in my early childhood.
(Though the biggest hurdle was that stupid Intel HD Integrated Graphics Chipset.)

I also Installed Paint.Net into this machine so I'd say it's my first photo-editing PC.

I later installed photoshop but that was an old copy circa 2002.

And yes, It even was my first 3D Rendering laptop but back then, I only had access to both Blender and Daz 3D, plus the Intel Chipset was barely adequate for any 3D Renders.

Once I got my MacBook Pro with Photoshop CS6 and a proper Nvidia graphics chip, I never looked back.
 

What happened to my HP Pavilion

By 2016, actually, not much. I did not have any issues with this later on but I remember fighting with my laptop's stability.

Fortunately, I was able to hard reset via battery removal. (No new laptops have removable batteries externally.)

Once I got my hand-me-down Macbook Pro, I decided to give the HP Pavilion Laptop to my mother.

By 2020, the pavilion was starting to show it's age too. Not storage related but externally.
In 2021, the exterior deteriorated. The hinge could barely close and we lost the power supply to it.

In May 2023, I decided saving the laptop was an act of necromancy so I just recycled it at my local recycle depot.

Fortunately before I recycled it, I was able to save the hard drive.

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